Falling in love with the most unloved Jaguar
We motored into the centre of Bath in search of food then got back to Cirencester without a problem. Next morning, feeling bullish, I took my children Sean and Caitlin to a Cheltenham car boot sale. They love the XJ-S, although Sean is so tall now that he doesn’t get into it very elegantly.
The car gets loads of attention, which I’m surprised about because I'd considered them to be relatively routine cars in classic terms, but they are getting rather rare now and obviously have captured something in the popular imagination.
I returned to the car at the boot sale (having bought nothing more exciting them some files for my unruly collection of loose road tests) to find two gentlemen of a certain age looking admiringly at the Jaguar.
It turned out that one of them had worked at ‘The Jag’ building them and he told me: "They were the safest car on the road with huge bars in the sills. You could run head on into a tank in that!"
I won’t be trying it out, but it’s nice to know it’s there.