John Simister
John recalls a trip Down Under in a Jaguar XJ40
John’s down under in an XJ40 admiring automotive oddities.
In the previous issue you read about a clutch of Eighties executive saloons revisited three decades later. Most were obvious enough but one seemed a fugitive from a higher plane. That fugitive was the Xj40-generation Jaguar XJ6, wearing a downmarket disguise of cloth trim and plastic wheeltrims, but clearly a posh boy at heart.
It was good to drive an XJ40 again. Last time I drove one was in the early Noughties, when I took the Jaguar Daimler Heritage Trust’s own example to show its chief creator, the late Jim Randle, as part of a tale of both reminiscence and missed opportunities for sister publication Classic Cars.
I also got to drive some very early XJ40S when they were new, including Motor magazine’s road test cars. I saw one of them, a silver Sovereign registered D36 BRW, again a couple of years later at the Millbrook test track in its post-press-fleet role as a testbed for ‘severe corrosion’ tests. It wasn’t performing well and looked truly desperate, the poor thing. At Motor we then had a long-term-test Sovereign in dark metallic blue, while our rivals at Autocar had one in light metallic blue. They had consecutive registration numbers (E394 HKV and E395 HKV, both long deceased) and looked really good parked together when Autocar then took over Motor in September 1988. For several months the new combined magazine enjoyed two Jaguar long-termers until the dark blue one was eventually retrieved by the factory.
Getting down (under) and dirty
Most excitingly, though, in September 1986 – just as the XJ40 was being readied for revelation to the world – I flew all the way to Australia to take part in some durability testing for a Motor feature. We’d all seen the spy shots of clumsily-camouflaged XJ40S being thrashed at remote locations, 16 of them covering a total of nearly two million miles in Australia alone, but added to the number down under were now three ‘Phase Eight’ pre-production cars, one of each model in the initial range, needed for Australia’s type approval.
My steed for the trip was a silver Sovereign that I was to drive from Sydney, across hundreds of outback miles to the edge of Australia’s dusty ‘red centre’. The story I wrote was so long that the last three of its nine pages were mostly solid text. Nowadays you’d give it at least 12 pages and let the pictures breathe, but magazines were more constricted back then.
I had to write about the way the Jaguar could hurtle nonchalantly at 100mph along dirt roads, how an approaching dust cloud might hide an unstoppable ‘road train’, how kangaroos and wombats might leap into the road from a clump of eucalyptus trees as dawn broke. There were mountain roads to test the handling, frustration at the 110km/h open road speed limit, and relief that despite roadside warnings of spotter planes there was only one to cover all of New South Wales. Policing is a lot tighter there nowadays.
I was very taken with the XJ40, over-light steering apart, but I can see now that I might have been somewhat guilty of a slight hyping of the home product. Fair enough; we all wanted it to succeed. But what I didn’t have room for in the story was a whole other dimension of Australian motoring back then: the Antipodean mutants of familiar British (and other) machinery.
The same, but different
I encountered 4.1-litre Cortina MKIVS and bulbousnosed Morris Marinas, all with six-cylinder engines and the promise of epic understeer. I saw Landcrabbased Austin Tasmans and Kimberleys, ADO 16s with E-series Maxi engines, Chrysler 180-based Venturas again with an extended nose to accommodate a straight-six. The occasional Morris Major and Austin Lancer was still to be seen, base-model relatives of the Wolseley 1500 with flamboyant fins in their later incarnations.
There were also Viva-derived Holden Toranas, a Holden Astra was actually a Nissan Sunny, a Rover 416i was a Honda Integra, and dozens more. It was a surreal parallel automotive universe. And now there’s barely any Australian motor industry at all.
I’ve been to Australia only that one time. It was a privilege not only to go at all, but to go when all those cars were still around.
John Simister has been at the heart of British motoring journalism for more than 30 years. A classic enthusiast, he owns a Saab 96 and Sunbeam Stiletto.