Jaguar XK120

By Jack Nerad

During his early years in the English midlands William Lyons gave little inclination that he would eventually achieve legendary status for the creation of sports cars. The son of an Irish muscian-turned-turned-piano-repairman, Lyons was a motorcycle enthusiast who was fond of racing his Harley-Davidson in local events during the bleak years of the First World War. He wasnÕt particularly enamored of working the piano shop, so his father helped him secure an apprenticeship with Crossley Motors, a Manchester-based car builder. But at just 17, Lyons was not ready to settle into the drudgery of the machinists trade.

With the Great War over, Lyons returned home, puttered about the piano shop for a while, and began contemplating what he really wanted to do with his life. As have so many people before and since during this period of contemplation, he took a temporary job as a car salesman for an agency that handled Morris, Rover and Sunbeam.

The early turning point in his life came when he met William Walmsley, who moved into his neighborhood at the conclusion of World War I. Walmsley was a bit older than Lyons, but the two both had a passion for motorcycles, and they hit it off fairly well. Walmsley was a tinkerer, and after purchasing a military surplus Triumph, he fitted it with a sidecar of his own design.

Now the British have always exhibited a peculiar affection for sidecars, as they do for other dubious items like warm beer and cold toast. So WalmsleyÕs uncommonly attractive and well-made sidecar offered a business opportunity that his ambitious young car salesman-acquaintance encouraged him to pursue. With loans from their fathers, Lyons and Walmsley established the Swallow Sidecar Company.

Under Lyons steady hand the business grew apace, and soon it branched out from building sidecars to the manufacture of automobile bodies. In those days custom coachwork was all the rage in Britain (much more so than in America, where it was largely confined to the most expensive luxury automobiles) and Swallow began to earn a good deal of income building attractive and sporty bodies for the ubiquitous Austin Seven.

In the Thirties, Lyons moved forward again, shifting from coachbuilding to building entire motor cars, albeit with engines derived from the Standard line of vehicles. In 1935, he successfully floated a stock offering to help fund the new venture, then moved forward quickly to display the SS 90, the companyÕs first sports model. Drawing on his car salesman experience, Lyons realized that he couldnÕt base his business on sports cars, so he was very careful to build his line around sedans, but he always seemed to have a special love for two-seaters. The SS 90 soon begat the SS 100, one of the best all around sporting machines of the mid- and late-Thirties.

World War II put a huge crimp in the progress of the British auto industry from 1939 until the late Forties, and it also cost Lyons his companyÕs good name. "SS," as his company had come to be known (Swallow Sidecars) had taken on an ominous connotation because it connection with Nazi storm troopers, so the company adopted the Jaguar name that it had first used on a mid-Thirties sedan. By 1948 Lyons was chomping at the bit to kick his company up into a higher gear. The end of World War II created a boom of pent-up demand both in Britain and the United States, but Lyons was forward-thinking enough to know that the boom wouldnÕt last forever. Ever the marketer he wanted to ride the wave of the next trend or, even better, create it. So he planned a bold stroke for the 1948 Earls Court Motor Show, a bold stroke that would be seriously plagarized by Chevrolet in the creation of its Corvette five years later.

Lyons knew his bread-and-butter was the production and sales of sedans. He set his engineering team, under the guidance of chief engineer William Heynes, to design a thorough modern line of sedans that would have some longevity in the post-war market place. What they came up with were a new chassis, complete with a very modern torsion-bar independent front suspension, and an all-new dual overhead cam six cylinder engine.

The question was: how could Jaguar Cars Ltd. Best show off these technical wonders?

Lyons answer was a show car to be displayed at Earls Court. If public reception to the show vehicle warranted it, Lyons projected a limited production run for the vehicle, perhaps 100 or 200 copies all told.

With this thumbnail plan in place and time short, Lyons set his craftsmen to work on the project. The sedan chassis was duly shortened to accept a swoopy two-seat roadster body whose shape, legend has it, came together in a period of just two weeks. Whether that legend is accurate, weÕll never know, but there is no doubt that the lovely and, for its time, advanced body shape was conceived and then built in very short order. In fact, the rapidity of its progress may well have saved it from unnecessary gee-gaws and busy-ness, the result of excess executive meddling.

The body shape was stunning modern for its time while retaining the graceful feel of classic roadsters like the Mercedes-Benz 540K and the BMW 328. The graceful sweep of its fenders offers an elegant transition from the pontoon fenders of the Thirties to the fully integrated fenders of today. Its long hood progressed from a tapered nosepiece to a wide cowl, and its round headlamps were housed in appealingly grafted nacelles between grille and fender. The high chrome-mounted divided windscreen was accented nicely by the low-slung doors.

Housed within the lovely body was the XK engine, whose stature would eventually reached epic proportions before it was finally put to pasture after 40 years of production. In an era when many production cars still offered flat-head engines, Heynes and his staff put together a dual overhead cam engine with hemispherical combustion chambers, not as a special "racing" powerplant, but for everyday use in sedans. With chain-driven camshafts operating huge intake and exhaust valves, it was a brilliant achievement.

The XK engine spun 160 horsepower from a displacement of 3.4 liters (210 cubic inches). Peak horsepower occurred at 5000 rpm, while peak torque of 195 pound-feet arrived at 2500. Not only did the engine offer terrific high speed potential (the car was dubbed XK 120 because of its 120-mph capability), it was also wonderfully tractable around town in top (fourth) gear.

Needless to say, the XK 120 show car was a sensation at Earls Court, and orders poured in so rapidly that Jaguar was obliged to re-engineer the body from hand-formed aluminum over ash to all-steel construction. As a sports car for the street, it created an entirely new market for such vehicles, particularly in the United States, where its success spawned the Chevrolet Corvette, and in Britain it was the precursor to many fabled Jaguar sports cars, including the D- and E-Types. Next Greatest Car>>