‘Early Jaguar E-types were automotive pariahs’
Quentin Willson
Half-way through the E-type’s 60th anniversary year I’m still finding it hard to convince enthusiasts there really was a time when tired early E-types were automotive pariahs. It may seem inconceivable now, but in the Seventies most 1961 3.8s were rusty liabilities and only for the brave. My walk to school in Leicester took me past chassis 36 (4444 RW), a BRG outside-lock roadster, parked casually by the curb with lumps of unpainted filler along its sills and rear quarters. A ‘For Sale’ postcard on the dash read, ‘Good runner, £400 o.n.o.’ Thankfully it survives. At bombsite car dealers you’d often see tired Es with rusty bonnets and the price – usually four to five hundred quid – plastered on the screen.
Those launch-year 3.8s hit rock bottom by the time they were ten years old. Rusting badly, they were usually driven by broke owners who just piled on more layers of body filler. Compared to the Series IIS and V12s they were dated and unrefined. No one coveted the fiddly outside bonnet locks and everybody complained about the uncomfortable seats, lack of footwells and no synchromesh on first gear. Motoring magazines actually warned readers to avoid 3.8s and buy 4.2s instead. They were unloved and if you leaf through classified ads of the period you can see that lack of desirability reflected in asking prices. How about this from 1971: ‘E-type roadster, 1961, BRG, taxed June, new hood, must be reasonable at £480.’ Note the slightly imploring ‘must be reasonable’. We know from owners’ records that rhd roadster chassis 33 was bought as a ‘garage find’ for £325 in 1970, chassis 47 was sold for £650 in 1972, chassis 63 for £250 in 1971 as a non-runner and in 1970 chassis 78 changed hands for £650. And these were all outside-lock, flat-floor, largely hand-built roadsters with lots of pre-production features. It would be at least another decade before collectors realised how special they were.
You’d see them driving round suffering from the most appalling brutality. Blown flexible sections on the exhausts, smoking engines, resprayed bright yellow or metal-flake purple with go-faster stripes, driven by bearded Lotharios in Afghan coats and bell bottoms. Even as a kid I sensed that something was wrong with the natural order. But – and here’s the miracle – despite their fall from grace, the collapse in prices and desirability, despite all those dodgy owners running their Jags into the ground, the survival rate of early outside-lock rhd roasters is nothing short of incredible. Look on xkedata.com (a very fine database of surviving early cars) and you’ll see that of the first 50 cars built by Browns Lane, 26 remain.
A 50% survival rate for a car that rusted so quickly and so seriously tells us one enduring fact – people didn’t have the heart to scrap them. Some strange impulse of affection saved so many from the breaker’s cutting torch and they quietly disappeared into sheds, barns and garages to be ‘one day’ restored. I don’t think it was because owners thought of them as future collectibles – they didn’t know what we know now. They saved them for one simple reason – even dusty, rusty and dilapidated, a 1961 E-type roadster is still a thing of remarkable beauty.
Quentin Willson had a nine-year stint presenting the BBC’S Top Gear, has bought and sold countless cars and has cemented a reputation as everyone’s favourite motoring pundit.