I have owned my Interceptor for nearly five years now, and have wanted one for most of my adult life, but if anything my love of the C-V8 goes back even further. Long before I knew that they could make cars out of plastic, and therefore even longer before before I could debate whether that was a good thing, or even ride a bicycle without stabilisers, I was growing up in the rural Berkshire village of Winkfield and used to see one regularly. In fact it was always parked up outside the doctor's surgery on Hatchet Lane and at the time I simply assumed it belonged to a doctor, a pillar of the community with a rakish edge, second only to airline pilot for knee-wobbling prestige round those parts. Of course, now I know that it could simply have belonged to a very ill person, their general good health and wellbeing (as well as their worldly goods) syphoned from them by Jensen ownership.
While others dismissed that slant eyed front end as ugly, I thought it was beautifully bewitching, a sort of naked DS light arrangement – though one assumes that the Ferrari 330GT was uppermost in Eric Neale's mind when he was drawing it – that spoke of brutal power and consummate manners, a lantern-jawed gentlemen who spent weekends up to his neck in mud and blood as he played rugby for his medical college's old boys team. The C-V8 would belong to the coolest, more serene of the old boys as they came back. The C-V8 owner would be a smoker.
