CAREFULUP there,” laughs Chris Mansell as I gingerly try the strength of the shipping container roof on which I’ve set up my camera tripod. “My Super V8’s in there!”
On the scale of comments you don’t expect to hear, that’s some way up there, but then it had already been an odd sort of day. At approximately dawn, I’d found myself doing a drop-off in a rainlashed Reading outside the festival of the same name, a hasty McMuffin breakfast grabbed a short while later before meeting a colleague from a train at Swindon station and then finding myself stationary on a flooded motorway as a violent downpour broke through the summer heat.
What really made me wonder if I’d stepped into a parallel universe though was finding myself just a few hours later chatting to a man who boasts not just one but four X300-generation XJRs on the premises. That’s in addition to the immaculate and very rare Daimler somewhere underneath me, a couple of XJ-S’s (one a rare Guy Salmon special) and a solitary X-Type.
“I think it got out of hand,” laughs Chris as we leather the cars
