The old girl not looking bad!

Looks superb and completely under the radar for most people.

Just stick a non-dating plate on it and keep it for a few more years.......

Absolutely. In fact, there is something more than a little cool about running a well cared for, older, proper car. All the right people do it; just have a look at the daily drivers in the car park at a Goodwood or VSCC event. Keep it as it is, maybe put a Prescott sticker in the back window and get a few knowing nods from the right sort of driver.

The age doesn't bother me, and I only slightly prefer the facelift cars (which are barely different under the skin). It's on 88k miles now, almost 60k of them mine. It needs a fairly expensive service at 100k (supercharger belts, around a grand on top of the usual service) and there seem to be some nightmare stories on the owner forums around then, though to be fair they seem to mostly relate to thrashed cars, or ones where people starting fecking about with the supercharger preemptively and cocked it up. Changing the engine chains and so on is an engine out job and costs an ALF, though they should not need doing. Jag won't warranty it past 100k and it would be a tad annoying to pay a grand a year for years then be out of warranty and have an issue, albeit unlikely in my motorway-used car.

And yes 12th it's a B+W sound system described by David Vivian (of joint hifi and car mag employment) as the best fitted to any car at the time, the later Meridian one on the facelift cars has more quoted output but is reckoned to be a little worse. It sounds epic, easily better than our new Yamaha sound base thingy in the lounge.

If ever you had to describe what a Q car is, you couldn’t go far wrong with that. It’s much more subtle than an E63 or M5.

You spotter! Had never noticed that myself (not that I knew B&W used them). Top work...