Living History

JAGUAR CLASSIC WORKS IN THE SHOP AND ON THE ROAD

- Michael Febbo

I’m walking through a warehouse quite a bit larger than a football field—American or rest of world. Most of its volume is filled with cars stacked two high and parked bumper to bumper and nearly door to door. There’s a main aisle down the center that allows you to drive cars simultaneously in both directions, but the logistics of getting a car on the second level buried five deep is mind blowing. Most everything in the building is either Jaguar or Land Rover, but there are a variety of other interesting makes and models sprinkled in for added flavor. This is just part of JLR’s (Jaguar Land Rover Group’s) collection that’s housed behind the new Classic Works facility in Coventry, England.

Walking amongst these cars, some nearly 80 years old, I’m struck by a sudden epiphany; I am surrounded by something literally priceless, even more so than the collection of cars itself—which is figuratively priceless. The smell of old leather, motor and gear oil pooling on the floor, the patina from decades of driving—this is heritage, something that no matter how hard newer car companies try to manufacture with storytelling and retro concept cars, they simply cannot.

Obviously, someone at Jaguar had the same thought as me, just a few years earlier.