Our Jaguar Mk2

The picture in the header shows our Mk2, 3.4 litres, first registered in January of 1963. It’s been in our family for a long time. My mother’s cousin bought it when it was about a year old. It’s been with my father or me from when it was about 6 years old. A Mk2 is almost unstoppable. Though it has stopped a couple of times: a drip from the radiator top hose on to the distributor and once the earth lead fell off the distributor. It’s covered a lot of Europe from Scotland to Italy and had a few adventures along the way. That includes going very fast on the German autobahn and me subsequently forgetting that there was a 100 km/h speed limit in the Netherlands. Fortunately, I was so distracted by the Porsche Cabrio of the Dutch motorway police that I missed our exit. This was fortunate because missing the exit meant going into Belgium, where the Dutch police didn’t want to go, and possibly allowed us to escape a fine. Or perhaps we wouldn’t have been fined: everyone loves old Jaguars, don’t they? The detour into Belgium lost us a little time and we ended up in the middle of a bicycle race on road surfaces that the old Motor and Autocar testers would have classed as ‘the worst continental pavé’.

Over the years, the car’s been much loved and much abused. Much loved, well it is a Mk2 Jaguar, one of the all-time great cars. And abused because I bent it somewhat in an awful accident and, like many Mk2s, it’s suffered at the hands of ‘restorers’. A Mk2 body is complicated and rusts badly, while good restoration is expensive. We’ve never felt rich enough to send it to one of the better companies, so it’s been limited to DIY work, earlier by my father and later by me, or spurious professional attention.

The picture at the top of the website is a recent one; it had just come home after several years in storage, while we were searching for a house in the UK. What next for it? Well, it’s still more than I can afford to re-build it as it should be done. I guess that means more DIY or even a donor body. I have looked at some possible donors, but the visible restoration work on them seems about as bad as on mine. And as for the work that isn’t visible … ?