OCTANE CARS
Editor James introduces his Interceptor. Nearly
Like most DaDs, I will never forget the day my first child was born – 9 September 2006 – but for me this is mainly because it was two months to the day before I left the house telling the wife that now we were parents we needed a sensible family hatchback… and came back with a 1968 Jensen Interceptor. Since then – well, until two years ago – I have averaged 6000 miles a year in the Mk1 and got at least that mileage again from the ‘hatchback’ anecdote.
I paid £3500 for it from a Yank car fan in Staines who had rolled-up jeans and a quiff and bought it solely for its engine. The upside of that is that he tackled the coolant flow to make sure it is probably the only Interceptor never to have run hot; the downside is that his focus on the engine and mechanicals meant that it wasn’t that pretty to look at, though it wasn’t quite so rusty back then.
The irony is that if I had paid £10k at that time I could have had a minter (and I had the money, having just sold my Piper P2) and, while mine has increased in value to probably £10k, that minter is now way over £50,000. And that’s why I am not a car dealer! Mind you, if I had used a really good example in the way I have used mine, it wouldn’t have been pristine for long, though equally it might not have been plastered all over the Jensen Owners’ Club website as evidence that rotten old nails are equally welcome in this brilliantly unsnobbish club.
Anyway, in the first ten years of my ownership, the Jensen was extremely well-travelled and shared daily driving duties with my other classics. It was rather less frowned upon on the school run than the noisier, smellier Triumph. It has been all over the UK, down to Le Mans a couple of times, and all across Benelux. Its biggest journey came in 2010 when I got married in the Pyrenees. After serious titivation and much welding by Oli at Classic Jaguar Replicas, it was looking as good as it ever has in my ownership for the 2000-mile round trip punctuated by the nuptials.
After that it was our main family car (and the youngest car we owned) for about six months. To be fair, it didn’t let us down in that time, but I simply couldn’t cope with the angst of knowing that everyone else in the car was always just waiting for it to embarrass itself so they could pile in on it, and me. Well, that and the eardrum-busting trip back from Milton Keynes at 70mph in second when the TorqueFlite played up. Again.
Actually, despite the Interceptor seeming to have always been only a heartbeat from mutally assured selfdestruction – and a lot of time spent replacing the leaf springs, hubs, brakes, uprating the carburettor etc – apart from general disintegration it has really only suffered two major persistent problems: hot restarting, which is normal, and gearbox self-immolation, which is not.
The first ’box blew up six months into ownership, was rebuilt, blew up again a year later, was rebuilt again, blew up again a further year later and was then ditched and replaced by a secondhand unit a fellow owner sold me for a couple of hundred quid and which I fitted with V8 guru Colin Mullan.
All was good until December 2015 when, on what had been a fabulous test run after fitting Pertronix electronic ignition, there was suddenly a terrible clanging on changes. I put it in the garage, rang around and, without pausing for breath, all the experts diagnosed the ’box having ‘thrown a sprag’ (ie, the
overruning clutch had busted). So I shut the door, turned my back on it for a few months, then sent it to an expert, who had good news (the ’box was fine but a propshaft UJ wasn’t) and bad news (the floorpan, brakes and previously smooth running had gone missing).
So I phoned my pal Len, who collected it and planned to do the works for me (seeing as I no longer have access to a workshop and the welding was too big a job to do at home). And there it has been ever since. In fact, it has been gone so long that, as my 50th birthday approached at the end of February, I genuinely started convincing myself that a Car
SOS ‘reveal’ of my beautifully restored Jensen was imminent. To be fair, I could have hassled Len a bit, but I kept thinking about not having to buy 6000 miles-worth of fuel a year at 7mpg and stayed schtum.
Anyway, as I write this, it has apparently just failed its MoT, but not catastrophically, and with a little bit of work should be road legal again and back with me very soon. I can’t wait.