Classic & Sports Car August 2021 XJ41 The Missing Link

Reproduced with permission of Classic & Sports Car magazine (August 2021)

Without the DB7 there would be no XK8, but the XJ41 is the project that spawned the pair via a design great and a race-team hero.

Before the Jaguar XK8 came the original ‘F-type’: the XJ41 concept and the XJ42 coupé sister.  The project was first mooted in 1980, a time when the XJ-S was considered a failure relative to the E-type, and was to be spun off the all-new XJ40 platform.  Originally it was to be a simple, relatively light car, but, as was so often the case in the bad old days of the British motor industry, things started to slip.

Its original launch date of 1986 was pushed back and competition grew stronger, forcing Jaguar to upgrade the specification, adding weight all the while.  What had been intended to be a simple rear-drive sports car, powered by a normally aspirated straight-six, was suddenly perceived to need at least the option of four-wheel drive and twin turbocharging.  Development costs spiralled, but still the project continued until one game-changing event in 1989, Ford bought Jaguar for £1.6billion.  New boss Bill Hayden undertook a forensic analysis of the business, and killed the F-type.

That would have been that, were it not for maverick Tom Walkinshaw, who’d developed and built the XJ220 and was looking for the next big thing.  His success in racing the XJ-S had turned sales of the big coupé around, and he wondered what the XJ42 might be like sitting on the XJ-S underpinnings.

“The view at Jaguar was that the XJ-S platform was out of date and no longer part of the plan,” TWR’s former designer Ian Callum told Autocar in 2013.  “But Tom knew it inside out and was convinced that he could build an F-type for a fraction of the cost of the one done in-house.”

Callum was sent over by Walkinshaw to see what could be done, and project XX was born.  Turning the XJ41 into something that could be built on an XJ-S platform was far from a cut-and-paste job – they had different wheelbases, tracks and overhangs – but the car came together.  “Then Jaguar said they didn’t want it,” recalled Callum, “which they were entitled to do because they hadn’t asked for it in the first place.  All the same, Tom had invested a lot and was not about to let it drop.  No he came in and said: ‘that Jag. D’you think you could turn it into an Aston?’  Which is exactly what I did”

This became the DB7, but the XJ41 saga still had one more twist: “Ford turned to Jaguar and said, ‘If Walkinshaw can put a car on that platform, why can’t you?”

Jaguar called the result the XK8 and cashed-in big time: “Without XJ41, there’d have been no DB7 and no XK8.”

 

Words: Andrew Frankel

Photography: Stan Papior

© Classic & Sports Car Magazine 2021