Jensen Interceptor

The shape is Italian, the proportions are British, the hardware is American, and the joins barely show. Federico Formenti drew it at Carrozzeria Touring, whose finances were failing so badly that Jensen bought the design outright, took the Superleggera markings off the drawings and handed them to Vignale to build. Touring stopped production the same year the Interceptor launched, which makes this one of the last significant designs to carry its fingerprints. The signature is at the back. The rear screen is one enormous piece of curved glass, hinged at the top, doing duty as both window and tailgate, and it is why the vernacular calls the Interceptor's back end the goldfish bowl. It floods the cabin with light and opens onto a load bay no GT of the period could match. The Marks are easy to date once you know the nose. Mk I is the plainest of the three. Mk II brought revised headlamp surrounds, grille and bumper. Mk III revised all three again and added cast headlamp finishers and 15in GKN alloy wheels. The FF, which shares the body, gives itself away with an extra louvre on each front wing and four more inches of wheelbase.

Jensen never raced the Interceptor and never seriously considered it. There was no competition department, no budget to build one, and no series in which a two-ton hand-built four-seat GT with an automatic gearbox made any sense. A company that could not fund a works effort for the FF, which had genuinely novel four-wheel drive worth showing off, was never going to fund one for the road car. What Jensen had instead was other people's racing. Between 1952 and 1966 the West Bromwich factory built the bodies for BMC's Austin-Healey 100 and 3000, cars that took class wins across European rallying, and it assembled the Sunbeam Tiger, two of which ran the 1964 Le Mans 24 Hours and neither of which finished. The Interceptor's own engine had a competition life it never shared: the same 440 Six Pack that made the SP the fastest road-going Jensen was Chrysler's drag-strip weapon in the 1969 A12 cars. The Interceptor met that engine at the other end of its career, wearing leather and a vinyl roof.

In Britain the Interceptor is a television car. Lynley drove one through the first two series of the BBC's Inspector Lynley Mysteries, which ran from 2001 to 2008, before the production moved him into a Bristol 410, and the 2025 revival put him back in a 1969 Mk I. The long-running joke is that American viewers were introduced to him as the detective with the Bentley, which he drives in Elizabeth George's novels and never once drove on screen. The owner list is the other half of it, and it is very much of its period: John Bonham, whose 1972 Mk III has since been through auction, plus Eric Morecambe, Ernie Wise, Cliff Richard, Henry Cooper and Ginger Baker. A Jensen was what you bought in 1972 when you had money and did not want an Aston. One clarification worth making, because it comes up constantly. The V8 Interceptor of the Mad Max films is an Australian Ford Falcon XB. It has nothing to do with West Bromwich beyond sharing a name.

Two things define living with an Interceptor: rust and heat. The rust is structural and expensive, and it is why so many were scrapped in the years when they were merely old cars worth nothing. The heat is more manageable but catches people out. The cooling system was marginal when new, the fans are electric rather than belt-driven, and a silted radiator or a scaled block will have a 440 climbing the gauge in traffic. Owners solve it properly with a good radiator and a fan circuit rewired and fused sensibly, then stop thinking about it. Everything else is gentler than the reputation suggests. The Chrysler V8 and the TorqueFlite are close to unbreakable and were built in millions. Lucas switchgear does Lucas things. The hatch seals give up eventually and the glass surround is where water finds its way in. Interior wood and leather are lovely and not cheap to redo. Fuel is the standing joke and the honest number is 10 to 14mpg, which is fine once you accept that this is a car for long Sunday distances rather than short errands.