Chasing Your Dream Car

The first time I laid eyes on Jezebel, she was in the company of one of my best friends. She looked a little rough around the edges, but she was a beauty, even beneath her factory-installed vinyl roof and clumsy after-market paint job. She may have been a bit worn out, but still, I wouldn’t have thrown her out of the garage for leaking a bit of oil, transmission lubricant or brake cylinder fluid. I was in love.

Jezebel was my first Jaguar and, unless I suffer some kind of unexpected wealth
accumulation and/or brain damage, my last. There’s an old saying that you should never buy a car from a friend. Experts caution you should never buy one that needs major work, and let’s not forget the snide advice that you should never buy a British-made car, period. I had to learn these rules for myself. It was like going to university: I spent $30,000 and all I have to show for it is a couple of T-shirts and some
stories that grow more boring every time I tell them. At least I still have the friend, Paul. His five years driving Jezebel cost him even more. We are brothers in futility.

What made Jezebel special was that she was an XJ6C, a rare two-door coupe model, one of only 6,487 ever made (if you don’t count the 1,677 Daimler-badged versions), all built in the mid-1970s. Superficially similar to the common four-door XJ Saloon (with which they share many mechanical parts), the coupes possess an uncanny poise and graceful beauty that photographs don’t quite capture.

Paul spent a fortune keeping her running, but then a thermostat blew out one night on the highway, causing the engine to make some very disturbing crunching sounds. He had her towed home and left her parked under his building, long enough for it to occur to me that I could rescue the car, fix the flaws and make her my own.

I had been a car guy once. With a little help from a tool-owning friend, I’d even rebuilt the engine of my 1972 Celica. However, that’s an efficiently designed Japanese car with a 1,800-CC motor. Have you ever looked under the forward-flipping hood of a Jag? That finicky power plant is massive for a 4.2-litre six-cylinder and ever so complicated. The shop manual didn’t help, being full of British terminology and mechanical variations depending on what month each part was built. Halfway through, I began anticipating sentences like, “And if the hydro-motivator was installed after lunch on the day before a bank holiday, everyone was probably rather drunk, so you’re on your own.”

Since Jaguar built the XJ motor for decades, I reasoned that I could just buy another one and do a swap. My options included wedging in a 12-cylinder, which would have been stupidity of a truly epic nature – who wants to buy spark plugs in 12-packs? – or I could “lump” her by installing a small-block Chevy engine (a common modification with several kits commercially available), losing some cachet among the cogno-scenti but gaining horsepower and fuel economy. In fact, it was on a lump email list (hosted by those filthy enablers at jag-lovers.org) that I met the guy to whom I would eventually sell Jez.

Confession: I’ve skipped over the expensive part. Jezebel, it turned out, had one other minor flaw, hardly worth mentioning, really. Her floor pans had rotted out. She was mere inches from turning into Fred Flintstone’s car or, possibly, breaking right in half. (And yes, I knew about this when I bought her.) The first thing I did was have her towed directly to British Motors in Surrey, where Ludwig was more than happy to attend to the bodywork while the bill-remittance part was enthusiastically pursued by his wife, known as Mrs. Ludwig.

Pockets emptied temporarily, I put Jez in storage while I mulled over what engine option to choose. And there she stayed for several years at $150 a month. Sure, I thought of her often. I also thought about arson, prying the identification numbers off and leaving her as shelter for the homeless or faking my own death so the garage landlord would have to solve things. But every time I dropped by with more garage-rental cheques and caught a glimpse of her magnificent frame, I fell in love all over again.

Until one day the love motor failed to start. What the hell was I doing with this expensive albatross of an automobile? Even if I got it running, it would only be worth a fraction of what I’d spent. I didn’t even live in the Lower Mainland anymore, and there weren’t any Jag mechanics out in the woods in my new neighbourhood. This had to end. So I contacted the guy I’d met online. He already owned a working XJ6C (the locally famed Purple Gherkin, in fact) and was only interested in Jezebel as a source of parts. Not surprisingly, she proved annoyingly difficult to break up with. I made the four-hour trip into town. Halfway there, I realized I’d forgotten the key for the ignition.
We decided we’d simply break the steering lock and I’d mail him the key later. But it
figured that the one part I intentionally wanted to snap, wouldn’t. There’s nothing like hanging out in a hot garage in the middle of August with another vintage-car fool, breathing atomized spider webs and the desiccated corpses of bugs, yarding on a steering wheel until it almost comes off before admitting defeat. Six days later, I made the trip again, with the key this time.

If I didn’t quite hate that car yet, the subsequent sweaty hour of manually coaxing
her two tons of dead weight onto a trailer certainly eliminated any last smidgen of
affection I still held for her. After she was loaded up, the new owner turned to me and said, “It’s almost too nice to raid for parts, but not nice enough to be worth restoring.”
I’d spent $30,000 to learn exactly that. At least I still have the Jaguar T-shirts and a jaunty cap from Silk Cat Automotive Specialists Ltd. in North Vancouver. Expensive clothing, I suppose, but it does come with a sad story, like all great stories of first love.
Goodbye Jezebel. Rust in peace.

• Tags
  • dave watson, 
  • Personal Finance, 
  • Trends