Wanted a new banner for my website and such so decided to take all my jags and few of my other darlings for a shoot.
2 years ago not a single of those legends were drive-able, now only my Saphira is left to fix and enjoy life she was meant to have 🥰

 

nice fleet you have there!!

 

Thank you! Which one is your favorite if you only could have one?

 

Very inspring, Joliette! Thank you for sharing!

Cheers,

Don

 

Thank you Don!

 

The funny thing is with those of us Jag lovers...seems there are more of us that own more than one than those of us that own only one (except maybe the F-Type owners...though I will break that mold when I can get my hands on the 6cy manual version I am after!. I don't (yet) have an XJ-S, but do plan on it eventually. As an XJS fan, are you familiar with the TWR SuperCat? https://www.topgear.com/car-news/fir...d-twr-supercat (I wish they didn't touch the pictures up so much and make it look like some kind of rendering!) Really cool picture and fleet!




Mike

 

Good luck Mike with your collection, and yes you are right, as a real enthusiast you cannot really have just one. Well in my case the second one I got was just because both needed so much work that I wanted to always drive one and work on the other 😁
Seen that TWR concept yes, but it will be too expensive and will fail eventually. It is almost impossible to succeed today as a small company with all those regulations. The car is crazy beautiful but one of reasons I love old cars is that they are old, not full of modern crap. I like fixing cars, not swapping parts or googling mysterious error codes.
I drove the XJ you have before. Had it loaned from LRJ dealer for a month. It is an amazing car.

 

Ha! Saaame. I think the concept is cool for the TWR, I have seen 404's get put into the XJSs also which is an...interesting restomod project for sure. And yeah, I too have enough Jag's as to be able to drive one while working on the rest for the same reason!

 

Rather than restomod, my idea is more like to collect new like stock parts, enough of them to be able to keep them in original form forever on the road. Or well replace them with something viable long term. Simplify, the electric, throw away some luxuries I can be without, but keep the wheels turning. Which was probably why I started with six cylinders well until the V12 bug bit me.
Luckily so far I never needed to part a Jag I got, but I would not mind to have one for parts I cannot ever get again reasonably new (suspension components etc).

 

Ahhh, it would be the XKR. Never been a big fan of Corvettes - as they seem to be a dime a dozen here in the states

 

I am totally in agreement with you, other than a small difference in outlook. This is surely preferred and I am a bot of a purist, but also a realist in that eventually, one day, we will find nothing but scarcity for a lot of our beloved Jaguars. So I sort of take the "why not both" approach, which a heavy preference to simple recovery and restoration. My general mode of operation is to purchase Jaguars that are on the Insurance and Salvage auctions and then work to restore them as well as I can. I guess at the end of the day, where I stand is that a restomod Jaguar is better than a crushed cube of metal or non-running jaguar! But I am all for older cars, will absolutely never ever own anything newer than the 2012 (well, the only exception being if I can find a good deal on a manual F-Type. I MUST have a manual Jaguar at some point, especially after selling my MINI. One of my XJLs will ultimately be a donor/Parts car for the other XJL. I was looking for a rear bumper cover that got melted on the first one I bought and realized the costs I was seeing were about what I could get an entire other identical XJL for, so that is what I did. They are a perfect match, plus though the parts one, I believe, has a timing chain that has gone and the various and sundry problems that come along with that, I plan on rebuilding it while I can and will have a full backup of the AJV8 Gen III read to be called up when needed.

Mike

 

Oh Mike, I wish we have here any kind of auctions, we do not even have a decent wreckyard, I have to use and abuse friends from UK to bring me parts I cannot source over Internet. In US it must be so much better.
I understand the need for manual jag, i luckily have 2, they are absolute pleasure and crazy awesome to drive and I do not even have fully perfect suspension. We have tons of empty twisty roads with awesome surface too.
Manual F-Type must be awesome. I drove one with supercharged V8 few years ago of a friend back in Germany. It's a crazy monster.

 

I feel like you perhaps know this already since you seem to be in the business and hobby of cars in that you have a lot of them, but in case you don't, I will say it anyway. (Or perhaps it will help someone else later, idk). If they do not have auctions on the Canary Islands, I know they have similar auctions in Spain, UK, etc. I get there would be transport fees and I have zero idea how much they could be, but where there is a will (and some money, I guess) there is a way. Not sure all of the rules in Europe for these types of auctions, but here in the states, most of the time you cannot buy unless you are a licensed dealer, dismantler, junk yard owner, etc. Sure, there are some "public" auctions, but I actually tend to stay away from those because the general public at large doesn't necessarily understand how auctions should work and the final bids are usually way higher than they should be. However, in the US, if you are not a dealer, you can use a broker and the one I use is very reasonable in terms of cost. Effectively, I pay an extra $160 USD per vehicle buy as a fee to use them as a broker, which is more than fair. The way it is setup is I still operate and bid independently, but just do so as a "representative" of the broker company. I am positive they have similar setups in Europe. Again, I assume you probably already know this and it isn't really possible for you to do so, or you probably would be already!

 

Thank you it is actually helpful, as I never bought on some corporate auctions or so, just Marketplace, before EBay and such. I do have official account for car maintenance and buy and sell, so I can for example buy at B2B parts dealers, but never used such auction. I will look around.
I have few friends in shops around who buy parts for cars but they are all in new parts business. Have to try it.
Delivery fee is here always sadly an issue and often even import tax or at least complications time to time. But if it is critical part, it would of course not stop me. Big fee definitely blocks many simple and beauty fixes though.
But most my restorations are anyway limited to basic functionality, beauty and luxury I cannot afford to have on 30-40 years old cars every time. For example with heating, A/C (both we do not need here) I do not bother much. Just has to be safe and usable, then we can invest time and money to make it better.