Jaguar’s 61 Sports Purpose XK140s… the “9S” Cars

The tattered old file folder is where it started. In the folder I found mysterious handwritten lists… scrawled chassis and engine numbers… a tally of some sort. Intriguing. Too intriguing to let rest. An obsession took root.

It was late 2015. I had just bought a beautiful and purportedly rare XK140MC. My goal: The 2016 Mille Miglia in Italy. The car I had found was one of the very few cars to roll out of the Jaguar factory with a special 9:1 compression engine… the “9S” engine. The seller had kindly provided a file containing assorted notes and paperwork on the car. Among the papers I found the odd handwritten tallies: Listings of chassis numbers and engine numbers, “FHC” and “OTS” sections, “LHD” and “RHD” notations, some numbers illegible. I found copies of correspondence in the file too; exchanges between my car’s previous owner and Mr. Mike Cook, Head Archivist at the Jaguar North American Archives in New Jersey. From the correspondence I gathered that the tallies were Mike Cook’s working notes from a project undertaken many years earlier: A tape-by-tape study of the Jaguar factory microfiche records; a detailed accounting of the rare 9S cars.