YOU COULD perhaps forgive the confusion. Aside from a solitary F-Pace in a corner behind the Discoverys, it’s rare to see a Jaguar of any kind at a JLR dealer these days, yet in mid-May at Marshall Jaguar in Newbury, visitors were no doubt bemused to find a showroom-fresh XJS on the premises.
Ironically, the building itself wasn’t even constructed until several decades after the XJS left production, but the lustre of the new paint and the factoryfresh appearance of the interior looked perfectly at home among the freshly minted Range Rovers. And when the good people at Marshall lent us a workshop lift, we were duly amazed that the just-off-the-transporter appearance extended to the underside as well.
The car didn’t always look this good though. Indeed, it’s debatable whether ‘Wilf’ (the nickname came from the number plate) looked this good back in February 1994 when it left Browns Lane since in so many ways it’s now better than new; no matter how charitable you feel, few mid-’90s production line workers with an eye on the clock put quite as much obsessive
