Jaguar began life as Swallow, making sidecars for motorcycles. Branching out into sports cars with the Standard Swallow, or SS, they created a new name for themselves in four-wheeled English motoring. The SS Jaguar donated its name to a new generation of sports cars that we know and love today. The XK120 was Jaguar’s first sports car under the Jaguar moniker, and it was no slouch. Its 120 mile per hour top speed made it the fastest production car in the world when it was built. Aluminum used in the body meant it was exotic and lightweight, in addition to fast and sleek. An all-around excellent automobile. This 1951 model can be found here on eBay.

It’s not bad for a project car. Everything that should be there looks to be there. It’s worth mentioning the powertrain situation. The seller states that this is their late husband’s project, and they give an extensive list of everything done to it. I’ll leave the specifics in the listing, but importantly: this car was powered by an XK140 engine when the seller’s husband got his hands on it. It looks like he wanted to restore it to its factory specification; there’s now a proper XK120 inline-six engine sitting under the bonnet, albeit not the one original to the car. The seller will include the XK140 engine that was in it when their husband started working on it, as well as the XK120 engine that’s in it now and a spare 3.4 liter Mark I engine. Three engines for one car isn’t a bad deal.

The originality continues inside, where it looks like the seller’s husband started to reupholster the seats in the original color palette and started re-chroming and assembling all of the interior trim bits. I spy a steering column poking its head out of the firewall, so this looks to be a left-hand drive model.

They don’t include any images of the underside itself, but you can sort of see it in the picture I used for the last paragraph and in a couple of other images. It was originally a California car, and it looks the part. Where you can see bare metal, there is zero rust, rot, or misaligned parts. Left-hand drive means it doesn’t have the same street cred as a right-hand drive Jaguar, but you can quickly put every other English car to shame just by going through your favorite drive-through restaurant. This is a fantastic base for a project–it’s already been started. Now all that’s left to do is finish it.