Background
Oh, lovely, lovely Jaguar. You’ve given us some mightily good cars over the years. Your Marks, XKs and different Types have beguiled and entranced a good many of the British and Worldwide motoring public.
Top of the tree? That’s subjective, but many would no doubt go for the E Type. Enzo Ferrari may, or may not, have called it “the most beautiful car in the world”, but that’s what the new XJ-S had to follow in 1975.
Misunderstood at first, the new beast was in fact more of a smooth GT than an out-and-out sports car. It offered the imperious XJ12’s suspension, brakes and majestic fuel-injected V12 engine in a sporting 2+2 package.
There was no doubt about its ability, but aerodynamicist Malcolm Sayer’s long-flanked and flying buttresses-endowed styling took a while to be accepted.
However, once they were, the model went from strength to strength; not only would it last an incredible 21 years in production (thanks to some wonderfully transformative facelifts), it would also come to become a defining icon of the 1980s, before powering into the next decade too.
Refined and supremely planted (it made a cracking race car), today it’s transitioned to become a truly great classic car. The 4.0-litre six-cylinder cars gained a reputation as the sportiest of the lot.
The terrific Flamenco Red example on offer below is fresh from 26 years of meticulous enthusiast ownership and comes with an interesting Jaguar Drivers’ Club provenance, having been loaned to it as a road test model when new and appeared in the Club magazine on several additional occasions.








