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Sixty years on from the unveiling of the XK 120 at the London Motor Show – then at Earls Court – Jaguar’s display at this year’s show won’t have made quite the same impact in the history books, although the marque itself can’t really be blamed for that. Now at the ExCel centre, the current incarnation of the London Motor Show has plenty of potential, but it has largely been ignored by manufacturers in terms of significant new model debuts. Yes, there were some ‘world debuts’ at the show – the Lotus Evora amongst them – but most manufacturers save the really important new cars for the Paris, Frankfurt, Geneva or Detroit shows. BMW didn’t even have a stand in London. Jaguar, to its credit, did have a sizeable stand presence and did show a new model derivative too, the aptly named XK60 version of the current XK. And, while that in itself is hardly going to shake the world in the same way as the XK 120 did in 1948, a little reading between the lines of recent news stories in the last month reveals that exciting times for the marque are not far away. For starters, a thinly disguised ‘hot’ XF with Mike Cross at the wheel was merrily blatting up the hill at the Goodwood Festival of Speed. Though referred to as a ‘prototype’, the car is likely to be the longrumoured ‘XFR’, which we expect to debut early next year complete with a new 500bhp, 5-litre V8. In fact, 2009 promises to be a very exciting year for Jaguar. A new 3.0-litre diesel engine is also widely rumoured to be due to debut early next year, and the build-up to the launch of the new XJ should also begin in earnest. While there has been no official confirmation of any of these three stories, if I were a betting man and there were good odds offered on Jaguar hitting the motoring headlines regularly next year, I’d be raiding the piggy bank…