1993 Jaguar XJS Celebration – Auction Car of the Week

While the world of cars may be wide and varied, that doesn’t mean that everything everyone has ever wanted exists. For example, we would quite like a V12 Triumph Dolomite, but alas, there is no such thing. Shame, but there we go. What we could do, of course, is get busy with the sparkly spanner and the hammers and build our own. However, that’s a big ask. Given we’re geared more towards writing about cars than building them. For other people though, taking the standard efforts of a manufacturer and tweaking, teasing and tuning them to be something bespoke is a welcome challenge. This of course leads us, quite neatly, to this 1993 Jaguar XJS Celebration. This is like no other, and it is all the better for it.

Look through the automotive history books and you don’t need to flick past too many pages before you find altered XJS Jags. There were bespoke convertible versions, the offerings from Lister and of course, the ‘shooting brake’ built by Lynx. But for Mike Sharman, none of those models quite hit the spot. Instead, he envisioned something wholly more subtle, but still truly bespoke. For Mike, these other custom offerings played with the lines of the XJS a little too much. The Lynx was clever, but it changed the long, low profile of the car considerably. What Mike wanted was an XJS with the same big-booted practicality of the Lynx, but without altering the look of the car.

It was an idea that stayed with Mike, a Jaguar engineer, for years. It rattled around his eager mind, he sketched it, he eyed up every XJS he saw and pondered how he would go about building it. Ultimately though, work, family, his motorsport endeavours and other life ‘stuff’ got in the way. However, after decades of ‘back burner’ status, he finally set about building his perfect XJS in 2009. And while the more cautious of us might have bought an average car, Mike instead found the best XJS Celebration he could. He then backed it into a corner and went at it with the angle grinder.

This XJS Celebration was a damn nice car to start with, but by the time Mike was finished, it was (and still is) other worldly. Using his engineer’s eye, Mike completely redesigned the rear end of the car, but in such a clever way. At a glance, all looks normal. It’s only when you look at it and see that sloped rear glass that you realise this XJS Celebration is not like the others. The rear glass came from an MGB, Mike fabricated a completely new rear hatch for it go in, too. The famous flying buttresses now form the inner walls of the spacious boot. The rear panel was cut, and welded to the new rear hatch, to give the car proper hatchback ‘low entry’ qualities. He then went on to line and trim the boot and hatch in fabric matching that of the XJS Celebration specification. He even sculpted a high-level brake light into the new lines. The final result? Well, look at it. It’s spectacular.

For as long as we have had the car, we have had optimistic home mechanics with bold ideas. Many of those ideas, though, end up as nothing more than a butchered car and a pile of scrap metal. Some don’t even make it from within the walls of our enthusiastic brains. Take our V12 Dolomite, for example. But, for every hundred home-brew projects that fail, there will be one that succeeds. And that’s what this XJS Celebration is. It looks factory. Mike built it with no compromise, no cut corners and with a seemingly bottomless mug of attention to detail. This car isn’t good, it’s spectacular. If you told someone this was built by Jaguar, they would believe you.

This XJS is more than a car. It’s a glowing example of what can be done with some skill and some imagination. It’s a credit to Mike, for sure.  And it’s a celebration (pun time is fun time) of just what you can do at home. You know, if you’re a skilled Jaguar engineer. And now – and this is the best bit – it could be yours. You’re just a bid away from owning a one-of-one car, and one that is so perfectly done at that. Yes please.