On Track to Post-Leyland Recovery

Abstract

In 1979, the official racing Jaguars were silenced, as British Leyland went through corporate agonies that threatened even Jaguar’s existence, in the early eighties. Given what had happened to Britain’s once globally dominant motorcycle industry, Jaguar employees faced the previously inconceivable notion that they could sink with the British Leyland ship, or simply be killed off by their ignorant owners. On the XJ-S front, sales were at an all-time low. In May 1980 John Egan became chairman of Jaguar under Leyland rule and he recalled:

‘Do you know we were just a one product company then? For my first nine months we made no XJ-S coupes at all!’ The Canadian importers ended that drought with an order for 100, Egan remembered, ‘then we made another 100 and that seemed to saturate the market for a while.’