This is the 5.3 liter V12 engine out of a 1989 Jaguar XJS HE, it’s been removed from the car and it’s being offered for sale in good overall condition, with the seller noting that it has good compression on all cylinders.
The Jaguar V12 first entered development in 1951 with Jaguar engineer Claude Bailey drawing up a design for a behemoth V12 that would have a displacement of up to 8.0 liters and use the upper end of two Jaguar XK straight-sixes fitted to a new joint crankcase.
Jaguar had no qualms about leveraging their recent 24 Hours of Le Mans win in their advertising. As the old saying goes, “Win on Sunday, sell on Monday.” Image courtesy of Jaguar Land Rover.
The original plan for Bailey’s giant V12 was to race it at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, and hopefully to win in no uncertain fashion. Rule changes and slow development progress resulted in the engine never being used in a race, though a version of it was fitted to the Jaguar XJ13 prototype, a Le Mans racer that would sadly never get a chance to compete.
In the late 1960s, after the XJ13 project had been cancelled, Jaguar Chief Engineer William Heynes assigned two of his senior engineers, Walter Hassan and Harry Mundy, to rework the V12 design into a road car engine that would be suitable for mass-production.
The engine Hassan and Mundy created shared roots with the earlier Bailey V12, but now had a single overhead cam per bank instead of doubles, with two valves per cylinder, an aluminum block and heads, and a displacement of 5.3 liters.
Though it had been originally intended to be fuel-injected from the very start, this was shelved for reasons unknown, and the first production engines were fitted with Stromberg carburetors.
The first Jaguar production car to receive the new V12 would be the Series III E-Type of 1971, the engine would later be used in a vast array of models including the Jaguar XJS, Jaguar XJ12, Jaguar XJR, Jaguar XJ-12, and Daimler Double-Six, as well as the Panther J.72 and the Panther De Ville.
Racing versions of the Jaguar V12 would also be developed, and they would win the 24 Hours of Le Mans outright in 1988 and 1990, finally vindicating the work that had been started by Claude Bailey all those years ago in the early 1950s.
Highly-modified versions of the Jaguar V12 would win at Le Mans in 1988 and 1990, fulfilling a dream first laid out by engineer Claude Bailey back in the early 1950s. Image courtesy of Jaguar Land Rover.
The engine you see here was originally fitted to a 1989 Jaguar XJS HE and as a result it would have produced approximately 295 bhp. The engine hasn’t been rebuilt as the car it came from had just ~32,000 miles on the odometer, and as mentioned higher up the seller says it does have good compression on all cylinders.
If you’d like to read more about this Jaguar V12 or enquire about buying it you can visit the listing on eBay here. It’s being sold out of Tampa, Florida with a Buy It Now price of $3,675 USD or best offer.
Images courtesy of eBay Motors
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Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
