Motoring Alan Judd
THE COST OF LOVING AN E-TYPE
Anyone familiar with Mark 2 Jaguars – those svelte and beautiful Sixties saloons beloved in their day by bank robbers and bookies – will know how they have evolved from crusher-fodder to prized items almost too valuable to be dirtied on the roads. My last one, bought in the Eighties for £2,250 before prices went seriously silly, was stolen after being left for a single night on a London street.
A number of restoration companies benefited from the explosion in values, rebuilding them with modern brakes, gearboxes, suspension etc, so that they were better than when they first bounced off Jaguar’s second-hand production line, inherited from Standard. Among the most prestigious is Classic Motor Cars (CMC), famed now not only for its Jaguars but for any other marque worthy of the investment.
The first thing that strikes you about its modern facility at Bridgnorth is its cleanliness: not an oily rag in sight, no abandoned spare wheels to trip you, no grease monkeys squeezing themselves beneath an axle because there aren’t enough jacks to go round.
The next thing that strikes is the relative quiet – granted, it’s punctured by power tools but they’re intermittent, and the overall atmosphere is of people quietly getting on with their jobs. These range from machining engine parts, to fitting and respraying new bodies, adjusting shut-lines on doors to within fractions of a millimetre, shaping the curve of a wing by hand, polishing a rocker-box cover until you can shave in it, cutting a cow hide to re-trim seats, and fettling the carburettors on a £2.2 million Pininfarina Jaguar XK120 you’ve just taken out for a test drive.
There are 52 staff, including eight apprentices, and each project – whether complete restoration or basic repair and maintenance – is guided by a responsible employee answerable for everything. If they can’t source a part for your ancient Bugatti, Bentley, Mini, BMW or Swallow (as the first Jaguars were called), they’ll remake it. They showed us parts made in 3D printers, a still (to me) mystifying technology.
I was there to see a friend’s E-type, a 1962 series 1 drophead in Carmen red purchased as a car that had been restored. So it had, after a fashion, but a CMC inspection produced a seven-page list of rectifications, ranging from the number of spot welds to a crumpled bulkhead. My friend lived off breakfast cereals in anticipation of the estimate, which included a new body shell (think five figures beginning with six) and nine layers of paint. Not to mention the interior and the bits that make it go. Enzo Ferrari is said to have said – perhaps apocryphally – that the E-type was the most beautiful car ever. My friend’s is indeed a thing of beauty, better finished, better presented and probably better running than the day it left the factory. And now, two years on, it’s almost ready for him to pick up and enjoy.
Except that he can’t. The cost of making this car as good as it can be, fully realising the potential inherent in the design, means that he now has to sell it. Though he’s by no means the first to find himself in this quandary, there’s something heroic about his doomed endeavour. He didn’t do it for the money, nor for the vanity of being seen, nor because he wanted a trailer queen, towed from show to show. He did it because he loved the thing itself. But we always pay for what we love, and now it will be for someone else to enjoy. If you’re tempted, contact CMC.