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At 11am on Monday 26 November, the first customer XF proper – the so-called ‘Job 1’ – rolled off the assembly line at Castle Bromwich (see news, page six) to be handed over to the Jaguar Daimler Heritage Trust. Its handover marked the beginning of a ramp up in XF production over the next few weeks to meet the volumes necessary for when deliveries begin in March. Of course, in these days of virtual design when the broad parameters of a new car’s performance are determined long before it is built, the physical importance of ‘Job 1’ being finished is perhaps less than it used to be. After all, not only did Jaguar’s engineers know that the car was ‘right’ before it was built (and many pre-production cars have already have been completed for final shakedown testing and for service on press fleets etc), but the XF was also unveiled to the world at the Frankfurt motor show back in September. So, for Job 1 XF there was no last-minute through the night drive to be completed while testing components along the way as Bob Berry famously had to do with the Geneva show E-type, 9600 HP. But don’t for a minute think that the removal of that romanticism means the moment Job 1 XF – chassis number 277 – left the assembly line was any less significant than the days when the first XK, ‘Mk 1’, E-type or XJ6 were completed. In fact, given the current situation Jaguar finds itself in, the completion of Job 1 XF is more significant than all the Job 1 models that have gone before as it marks the beginning of the production life proper of the car that holds the key to the marque’s future.