1972 Jensen Interceptor.
This particular Jensen has spent the last 18 years in dry storage, a true barn find car if you like. With only one owner from new, and having covered less than 20K miles, the car has a very interesting history.

It came to us after the owner removed it from storage in an attempt to return it to the road. The car was running extremely poorly and headgasket failure was quickly diagnosed. Whilst removing one of the heads, we noticed that there was an evident casting error which was partially blocking one of the engines waterways. We carefully removed the casting flaw and resurfaced the cylinder head faces, before reassembling the 7.2 Litre V8.

It was at this point that we stumbled upon a service record for the car, which pointed out the car had suffered from overheating since new. Time will tell whether or not the casting error was responsible.

The trouble with cars that have been laid up in storage for long periods of time, are the little niggly faults that they develop. These are often extremely annoying and very time consuming to repair, and the jensen had its fair share of faults. The carburettor had to be completely rebuilt and a string of wiring faults were rectified, including the most temperamental rev counter ever known to man!

The owner has now decided to restore the car to its former glory with a full respray. We hope to carry this out in late 2007, at which point this could become a very special, low mileage, 1 owner example of a classic british sports car.

July 2007

Due to age and the long period of time that the car had been standing, we had noticed that a number of the coolant hoses had began to perish, so the Jensen came in to have them replaced. However when we took the radiator out of the car, it literally fell to pieces. It was only the mounting surround that was actually still holdong the rad together!

No longer available new, the radiator was rebuilt and re-cored, hopefully putting an end to the Interceptors troublesome water leak.