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In the mid-1950's John had a customer, Tony Hubbard whose family were involved in Woolworths stores in England, who wanted something different and John agreed to see what he could do. He talked with Miss Fenton at Jaguar who was not only sales manager of the company but was William Lyons' personal secretary. ( "Everybody had two jobs at Jaguar" remarks John.) and managed to buy a complete Jaguar XK150 chassis and engine which he believes is the only time Jaguar ever sold a car without a complete body. This was sent to Bertone, the famous Italian coachbuilders, to be styled. " A few weeks later I was sent a full size set of drawings of the car " said John, " and shortly after that I was asked to go to Italy and see a specially prepared full sized buck they had made. They had made the buck with one side of the car different from the other so that I could choose the style I wanted. On one side the roof line looked too high and so I chose the other side and they went ahead and built the car." As Hubbard wanted something special Bertone produced
a very special paint job. They first painted it in gold and then
put an opalescent red on top so that the colour of the gold shone
through, a spectacular colour scheme. However, when the car arrived
at Guildford there was a small scratch on it and Coombs had a terrible
time painting out the scratch without having the Once it was built, Coombs was very pleased. He telephoned Lofty England at Jaguar enthusing about the car but Lofty didn't want to know. Eventually, however, he did take a look at the car and indeed borrowed it and took it back to Coventry for a closer look. John feels that some of the small styling features on this Bertone bodied XK150 were to find their way into future Jaguar models. However, no matter that Tony Hubbard liked the car, he sold it after six months to a London architect who changed the 3.4 litre Jaguar engine for a 3.8 litre. Very few photographs of the car ever appeared even though it was a stunning design and would have made Jaguar a fortune had it been put into production. We now move a few years further on and a visit I made to Italy. I arrived at Lydd airport for the air ferry service that used to run from there to Le Touquet using front opening transport planes. Imagine my surprise when, over in a corner of the customs hall, was a golden red car with an interesting body and a Jaguar XK150 badge on the nose. I spoke to the customs people about it and they said that it had been impounded as someone had taken it out of the country and was due to pay further duty on it on his return. He had not paid the duty and now the car was waiting to have the duty paid or else be sold. Forty years later, in August 2000, I was in Monterey
for the Pebble Beach concours d'Elegance. |
Various auctions take place over the weekend. I drove out to the
classy Pebble Beach golf course where the Blackhawk Collection display
of cars due to come up for sale. Blackhawk, based in Danville, California,
south east of San Francisco is a motoring enthusiast's paradise
but on this occasion I could not believe my eyes. Here was the same
Jaguar XK150 I had seen all those years ago in the customs shed
at Lydd airport. Now it looked pristine and had clearly had a full
respray as the muted reddy gold of the original had long since disappeared.
It is still a beautiful looking car which can hold its own against
most of the modern day styling classics. I did not stay on for the
auction to see what happened to the Jaguar and whether, in fact,
it was sold.| Welcome |
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Valescure Concours - Here in the south of France there are a number of motoring events. .... read more
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