Age does few of us any favours. Unless you’re Sean Connery or Honor Blackman, then there’s a good chance you were in your prime in your youth rather than now.
In car years, three decades is a long time, but that’s how long the X300 has been with us now – yet it’s definitely a Sean Connery kind of car. It doesn’t look as new as it once did, but it is still extremely handsome. It has aged fantastically, like a proper Jaguar should.
The X300 was the first car to be styled entirely under the stewardship of the late Geoff Lawson, who was only the second head of design to work for Jaguar, the first being Sir William Lyons himself.
“Designing a car is like making a film,” he told the Independent newspaper at the time of the new XJ’s launch. “Most of it ends up on the cuttingroom floor. What remains is something that I believe has to look good not just now, but forever.” In his office, Lawson had a Fender Stratocaster guitar, and in his garage a Cherry Red 1955 Chevrolet Corvette – his own interpretations of designs that transcended generations, which was partly what he hoped to achieve with the X300.
When Lawson died unexpectedly in 1999, aged just 54, Jaguar’s executive director Mike Beasley said, “Finding people who can sustain Jaguar’s renowned design heritage, as Geoff Lawson did, is tough.” His point of reference was the XJ saloon, which had, by then, become the X308, but was proportionally little different.
The X300 was Jaguar’s first new car to be launched under Ford and had been rushed into development as soon as the ink was dry on the takeover paperwork, and part of its styling success was down to its builtin obsolescence. Its ‘modern retro’ styling influenced a theme that Ford boss J Mays would use across the company’s entire product spectrum in years to come.
It sold readily, with new and returning customers flocking to get their hands on what BBC’s Top Gear magazine had described as, “Probably the
