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You can buy a new old Jaguar XKSS. For £1 million

The pretty XKSS road racer is finally having its production run completed. You want one

Published: 23 Mar 2016

Jaguar’s special ops are on a roll. Following the F-Type Project 7 and Lightweight E-Type comes this, the continuation XKSS.

It’s more like the E-Type, though, in that it’s Jaguar finishing off a production run that halted midway. In this case, the nine XKSSs whose manufacture was ended by a factory fire are being rebuilt, completing the proposed 25-off production run nearly 60 years after it started.

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The XKSS was designed as a road-going version of the hugely successful D-Type racer - a three-times Le Mans winner, no less - with more production friendly windows and doors among its small modifications. Everything else remained intact, though, including race-spec suspension and a 3.4-litre straight-six engine with 250bhp. It may be beaten by a Renault Megane nowadays, but that was a fair heap of power back in the XKSS’s day.

Sixteen were made in 1957 (one of the originals is pictured in green) before a blaze at Jaguar’s Coventry factory cut the production run short. And much like it did with the Lightweight E of 2014, Jag is picking up where it left off and building those final nine cars as continuation models, the grey car above a render of how it will look.

Each will be hand built to original specification, and as such, you’ll be paying more than £1 million to get your hands on one. That will buy you one of the prettiest cars on the planet, though, and something TG host Chris Evans describes as the “best-handling classic car” he has ever driven.

Time to price up any spare internal organs…

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