ROBERT COUCHER
The Driver
The Best Sedan in the World. That’s how Road & Track magazine rated the XJ6 after its launch in 1968. ‘The finest Jaguar ever,’ said boss Sir William Lyons. He would say that, of course, but it turns out he was right. The XJ6 was the best and most successful Jaguar of the lot. Jaguar has had a long history of revealing stunninglooking cars since its inception in 1922 as the Swallow Sidecar Company. William Lyons had a real eye for styling and the first Jaguar, the SS 2½-litre, looked like a svelte Bentley but cost one-third as much. This was followed by the curvaceous SS100 sports car, then the XK120 and E-type, all of them incredibly beautiful and attention-grabbing machines at affordable prices.
A four-door saloon was never going to be as overtly stylish as the self-indulgent sporting Jaguars, but the XJ6 was a masterpiece of understatement. It continued Jaguar’s feline look by being low, curvy and smooth when most saloons of the time were boring, stodgy boxes. Jaguar had invented the sporting saloon with its Mk1 and Mk2 models, but the XJ6 made them look prehistoric.
‘Grace, space and pace’ was Jaguar’s slogan at the time and the XJ6 lived up to it. Although it was less obviously sporting than its predecessors, the XJ6’s level of engineering sophistication meant that even the quickest Mk2 would battle to keep up with the XJ on a challenging road. Styling aside, the XJ’s real genius was its suspension, the rear being essentially that of an E-type. Here was an affordable luxury saloon that combined Rolls-Royce refinement with Jaguar pace. The venerable doubleoverhead-cam straight-six produced just enough grunt in 4.2-litre guise to keep things interesting, and the chassis ironed out any unforgiving tarmac.
The XJ6 I really want is an early Series 1 with a manual overdrive gearbox: steel wheels and hubcaps, deep grille, slimline bumpers and that attractively simple interior. The rear legroom is compromised, rectified with the Series 2 in 1973, but who can resist the short-wheelbase look? I missed an immaculate example some years ago, in dove grey with red interior and MOD. The XJ engine never mustered much more than 160 real bhp but these days specialist engine builders can extract a reliable 220bhp from a roadfriendly
engine. Mated to a manual gearbox, that would make a fine Q-car.
As with the previous Mk 2 3.8, Jaguar could not resist hot-rodding the XJ6. So in 1972 it shoehorned in the 250bhp V12 engine and created the XJ12. That said, ‘hot rod’ is a misnomer because the mighty 5.3-litre motor is as smooth and refined as you can get.
Octane once tested an XJ12 against a Mercedes-Benz 300SEL 6.3; the Jaguar felt every bit as accelerative, but proved more hushed and relaxed while getting on with it. For 1976, though, Ralph Broad produced a proper hot rod, the 550bhp Broadspeed XJ12C coupé for our own Derek Bell and co-driver David Hobbs to race in the European Touring Car Championship. Derek enjoyed the car’s balance and handling, but it was just too heavy and kept breaking things. I never really liked the XJ coupé because the car was better as a practical four-door. If you wanted a sporting Jaguar, there were the E-type Series 3 and, later, the XJ-S, which were proper two-door designs. The XJC suffered from wind noise, and was so cobbled-together that the roof had to be covered in vinyl because the pillarless body would flex enough to crack the paint.
We had an XJ6 Series 2 in the family and my father ran it for years in Cape Town. It was a CKD (Completely Knocked Down) kit assembled by Leyland South Africa. It looked elegant in light metallic blue, especially as father fitted the later pepper-pot alloys from the Series 3. The Series 2 had a bad reputation for build quality and reliability, as with all BL products of the time, but our car was pretty reliable and the body lasted well, even if the interior was embarrassingly cheap and shoddy. Maybe the manufacturing process in SA was slightly better than in the UK. I can’t imagine it being any worse.
Our car’s standard 4.2-litre engine always felt asthmatic. Tuning it beyond 200bhp would have been expensive, but there was a solution in South Africa also popular in the US: squeeze a small-block Chevy under the bonnet and enjoy 280bhp all day long. That’s much what Jaguar itself did in 1997 a few XJ generations later, inserting a 4.0-litre V8 and even offering a supercharged XJR model pounding out a decent 370bhp. The Jaguar XJ hot rod had finally arrived.
‘THE XJ COUPÉ’S ROOF HAD TO BE COVERED IN VINYL, BECAUSE THE BODY FLEXED ENOUGH TO CRACK THE PAINT’