RE: Jensen Interceptor MkII: Spotted - Page 2 - General Gassing

3,189 posts

80 months

Wednesday 19th December 2018

I like Interceptors. I've only driven one, which was a 'Mark 1-and-a-half' - a brief period in 1968 when the cars had the body and interior of a Mark 1 but the steering rack and brakes of a Mark 2. I was expecting it to be like an American muscle car - all straight-line speed and otherwise soft and wallowy. In fact it was surprisingly tightly-sprung and quite well balanced dynamically, although it's certainly no sports car and still falls into the mould of comfortable GT. Not that fast for all its power and thirst but truely effortless with completely linear and constant acceleration regardless of road speed, engine speed or gear. And it sounded like a whole flock of Morgan Three-Wheelers.

I drove it on a warm spring day and it was like a four-wheeled sauna. Partly because of that wrapround rear screen and partly due to the huge heat-soak coming through the transmission tunnel. Despite having two massive electric radiator fans with four metal blades a-piece it got progressively hotter at idle, right up to a hair's breadth below the red line on the temperature gauge. As soon as you started moving again it would cool down. It also suffered very badly from vapour lock. But as a classic to cover long distances at high speeds in - superb.

A friend of mine briefly owned a 440ci 4-barrel MkIII, which needed a good service and tune-up. With it idling in his back garden while we set up the timing and the carb mixture it slurped its way through a third of a tank of petrol.

Turbobanana said:

It beggars belief that anyone could let a car get into such a state, even if they didn't like cars, or there was some political (or emotional) reason not to sell it.

People can be strange about such things. In the village where my parents lived there was a guy who owned an MGB GT. Absolutely nothing special - a white, V-reg, 'rubber bumper' GT on Rostyle wheels with 'deck chair' seats and a Webasto roof. But he was obviously fond of it and it was a tidy, straightforward example. He would take it to work and back in the summer and you'd see him cleaning it and doing some tinkering at the weekends. Unfortunately he died suddenly in his 50s and his wife couldn't bear to part with the car. My dad (who had an MGB himself at the time) enquired about buying it and she gently refused, saying that she didn't want to get rid of a car that her late husband had been so fond of and and lots of good memories for her. So it sat outside on the driveway for years, exactly where he had last parked it up. The tyres went flat, it became covered in moss and bird spatter, the scuttle filled with leaves and then the Webasto began to perish and peel. Then rust began to bloom out of all the usual MGB places. Then, I assume, a rear spring mount rusted through because it began sagging at one rear corner with the tyre pressed into the top of the wheel arch. It sat there, entirely unused and unloved, for a decade before she sold the house and presumably had someone cart the 'B off to the scrapyard because it was now worthless. I can't believe that that's how he would have wanted his car to be treated or that having it mouldering away on the driveway was what he would have deemed a fitting memorial to him but, entirely understandably, logic or even a degree of emotional seperation, doesn't come into these matters.

P5BNij

15,875 posts

106 months