May
We are invited by Jaguar Cars to attend the company’s celebrations at Penns Hall, Warwickshire. I contact a number of other owners who might be interested in attending and we field no less than nine cars for this historic event – three more than the originals on show. We got a great write up in the Coventry newspapers afterwards.

September
I decide to enter Leige Targa Leige rally using a the SS100 that I have recently bought back from Don Kirby. With co-driver Andrew Rozyski, we set off on a manic blur of driving activity which takes us over 5000 miles in twelve days from Leige, Belguim through parts of the Mille Miglia and all the way down to Sicily to drive the historic Targa Florio course. The whole event was one non-stop huge adventure. For some competitors there were breakdowns, accidents, arguments and disagreements. For Andrew and me, however, the event was a complete breeze and we never had to do a thing to the car – it ran perfectly the whole way there and back. The southern half of Italy was a surprise to us for its comparative poverty. We set sail from the mainland acress the Straits of Messina to the island of Sicily which I had imagined we would reach an idyllic island. We drive along the coast road to Palermo where the industrial smog and squalour must surely be the worst in Europe and the island was very barren. The old Targa Florio course is incredibly bumpy; perhaps recent road repairs have left it deliberately in this condition to dissuade Italian hotheads from using the course as an unofficial racetrack. The scenery though is rugged and spectacular. The homeward journey north is principally along the eastern Adriatic part of Italy whereas the route south had taken us through Tuscany, Pisa and Rome. We make many friends on this rally and I was delighted when one of them, Roger Tushingham, rang in 2004 to say that having watched the cars (there were three other owners with our cars) performing so well on this rally he had decided to buy one for himself.

November
I first went to the London Motor Show with my father at the age of seven in 1948, and I remember seeing one of Lord and Lady Docker’s Daimlers that was decorated with gold stars . I also remember seeing the all new XK120 on the Jaguar stand – albeit briefly because their exhibit was completely mobbed by thousands of people wanting to admire this sensational motor car. Exhibiting my own product at the London Motor Show in 1999 was a much less frenetic experience, but a continuous ten days of answering questions from hundreds and hundreds of people is very tiring. Nevertheless we sell one car immediately after the show and in 2004 someone who had visited, rang to say he now had enough pennies in the piggy-bank to buy one as well.