jpsellars.co.uk

There's only one car that these could be destined for...

I’ve got a new set of wheels, but the rest of the car is in Gloucestershire. Allow me to explain. A while ago I struck up an agreement with a friend whereby he’d loan me his Jaguar XJR for a few months, and all I had to do was stump up the cost of sorting it out with a clean MOT. Since I’d always fancied a supercharged XJ on our driveway I could hardly refuse. I’d been watching a tidy sapphire ‘M’ reg on on ebay for a while and it seems there are few more affordable ways of installing 322bhp beneath your right foot these days, but I’d rather keep the money for my holiday this year.

So that’s how I ended up outside an industrial unit near Dagenham on Sunday evening, meeting a man in a van with some wheels. For reasons I haven’t yet grasped, the car’s sitting on a set of Sovereign alloys at the moment and we wanted to restore a bit of originality. Unfortunately good 17 inch XJ-Sport alloys are getting ever more scarce, but it looks like my £195 on ebay has bought me a perfectly usable set. All the tyres are Pirelli P-Zeros with a good 4-5mm tread and no obvious damage, so we might even get away without having to approach any banks over funding for replacements for a while at least.

Now we just need to get them united with the car, then it’s play time.