Getaway with you

Villains with a love of 1960s style may need to pull off a bank job to own this beauty.

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These days, BMW and Mercedes-Benz are the marques best known for offering souped-up four-door cars off-the-shelf through respective M and AMG tuning houses. But the former racer and Jaguar dealer John Coombs was likely the first to tempt enthusiastic drivers with tweaked saloons back in 1962, when he created a menu of modifications for the already sporty Mark II 3.8.

Born in Chertsey, Surrey, in 1922, Coombs ran the eponymous dealership founded by his coachbuilder father, William, and took up motor sport postwar in both Formula 2 and Formula 3.

He was also a keen club racer during the 1950s, entering a Jaguar Mark I into the Silverstone TT of '56 (the year in which Jaguar officially retired from competition), subsequently establishing his own team that gave seat-time to a firmament of up-and-coming stars, including Graham Hill, Jackie Stewart, Jack Brabham and Roy Salvadori, who all achieved impressive results on track with Coombs-modified Mark IIs.