The World’s Most Famous 120 Fixed Head Coupé

With very little time to spare, we completed the substantial repairs to the famous 7 Days and 7 Nights XK 120, which is part of the Jaguar Heritage collection, in time for the 2009 Goodwood Revival meeting, where it was displayed outside the Earls Court re-creation in the paddock.

Originally the XK was used by Jaguar’s legendary Engineering Director, Bill Heynes, as his road car. However, when Jaguar decided to take a 120 to the banked Montlhéry track, just outside Paris, for a spot of record breaking, they used this car, the second right hand drive example built. Pye provided a radio so the drivers could keep in touch with the rudimentary pits.

Among the four drivers was a young Stirling Moss who remembers it well and thinks the feat of covering over 16,000 miles non-stop for seven days was quite something for a road car. He recalls that the track was very bumpy, just to add to the challenge.

To alleviate the boredom, Moss and his fellow drivers Jack Fairman, Leslie Johnson and Bert Hadley, played all sorts of tricks on each other. One got on top of another’s shoulders and they wrapped an enormous tarpaulin round them like a very large cape, added a cone to his head and appeared in the darkness on the edge of the banking!