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As I write these words it’s 8.30am on a Friday morning in late November, and it’s a morning that can best be described as filthy in terms of the weather outside. By the time I arrived at the office the sun had barely made an appearance, the rain that was falling when I started my journey hadn’t stopped, and the country lanes that make up the last few miles to the office were slick with mud and leaves. Classic driving conditions they were not. Or were they? On an almost identical morning at the beginning of the month and for reasons that I won’t bore you with, for the same journey I was behind the wheel of a rather agricultural modern pick-up, a pick-up that provided a driving experience about as far removed from classic Jaguar motoring as was possible. Yet, as the rain fell and mud got caked up the side of it in ever-increasing layers, I couldn’t help but feel I was in a vehicle well suited to the conditions. It was only on having made it to the office and then read the story about the ‘Jenks’ E-type (see pages 37-40), that I felt rather daft. For those of you that don’t know, Denis ‘Jenks’ Jenkinson was the famed Motor Sport journalist who enjoyed getting involved in motor sport as much as he enjoyed writing about it (and if you haven’t read his account of winning the 1955 Mille Miglia alongside Stirling Moss, you really should…). In the course of his work Jenks regularly clocked up huge mileages in Europe through blatting from one Grand Prix or Sports Car race to another during a season. And in the mid 1960s his car of choice was an E-type 4.2 fixed-head.