IT’S THE spring of 1976 and in a British Leyland dealer a customer is giving the Jaguar Daimler salesman a hard time: clearly a man of considerable means, he knows very much what he wants and he intends to get it.
What he wants is a two-door coupe, with the elegant pillarless style then in vogue, a prestige badge, enough power to set it apart from the run-of-the-mill Granadas and Mantas... and a manual gearbox. As his stringback gloves testify, this is someone who likes to be in control and for him a lazy three-speed self-shifter just won’t cut it.
Sweating under the showroom lights as the weather already warms up for that year’s legendarily hot summer, our hapless BL chap tries to explain that yes, he would be delighted to supply a Jaguar coupe and with a V12 badge on the boot, nobody would dare to question his muscle, horsepower or financial. But the manual
