Jaguar/Daimler V12 Engine - a Powerhouse in a Silk Glove | Tyrrell's Classic Workshop

Hello and welcome to another

classic

Tyrells

workshop

. Today we're talking about a slightly out of focus car again and not some kind of supercar that takes your breath away, it's not all blood and thunder and a lot of noise and wheelspin and all that kind of good stuff. Talking about subtle, but like I would really describe it as kind of a fist in a kid

glove

, and that's this car, the V12-powered Jaguar or in this case Daimler, it's one in the same car. In fact, this was a real turning point for many reasons why Jaguar was the first automaker to bring the v12 almost into the realm of the real world, uh, there was the Cadillac Maybach Rolls-Royce in the 1920s and 1930s. , hispano-suiza, many extremely esoteric high-end manufacturers all had v12s at one time or another and ferrari and lamborghini continued that trend in the 1960s or 1940s onwards in the case of ferrari, but

jaguar

actually managed to develop a v12

engine

which wasn't exactly for the masses but certainly not for phone number money and They used some very, very clever tricks and

engine

ering to get to that more in a minute, but the shape itself is a series 2 series 2 xj car saloon on which it is based, is called

jaguar

xj12 in terms of jaguar or the lady double six.

In Daimler terms, the only difference between the Daimler and the Jaguar was what is called badge engineering, which was very prevalent in the 1970s. Rolls Royce and Bentley did it too. Same car, different badge, different hubcaps, different grill, one or two other things, maybe the little instrument symbol. say d or j on the instrument something as simple as that and that was it, or you had a

daimler

or a jaguar, some differences in the finish, that was the norm, then if you took it to the next level you had this car and this is called vandomlar double six and bridges leyland, who were making these cars at the time, bought dutch coach maker uh vandam pla the right to the name and made it the same thing that ford did with the team.

You had a capri team. Grenade team. Mustang team. In the 1970s it was a kind of design house of coachbuilders and coachbuilders who added to their high-end cars to make them sound more elegant and this is a vandeemplar double six. This car had a lot of different things. besides the jaguar and the

daimler

it had metallic paint in these beautiful six shades they made them in gorgeous colors this is a sage green it had the vinyl top which is an acquired taste and it had a different interior more luxurious individual rear seats . Unlike a bench with different joinery, it had standard automatic air conditioning, which was revolutionary.

It was arguably the first car to have automatic climate control and it had things like these beautiful pressed chrome wheels that were an optional extra on the Jaguar and Daimler, but it was standard on this car and this car was priced considerably more than the jaguar or the daimler, but what really impressed me as a kid about this car was its elegant appearance, yes, and to me that's the way it's still impressive, it's absolutely elegant. but it was also the performance, I mean this car in the period was 140 miles an hour plus the car was going 150 miles an hour with the later fuel injected engine like this, yeah, and I have an issue of motor magazine Here from 1977. showing an thanks to the incredibly smooth and quiet v12 engine, um like A comfortable, elegant, spacious long distance express, it is one of a kind and if we take a look at the price of these new cars, I have a price list here in the same issue of the engine and the jaguar xj 5.3 efi electronic fuel.

The injection is £9,400 and the slightly more luxurious Daimler version is £9,700, but the Van den Plar Double Six EFI is £12,768. So this was 30 per cent more expensive than the Jaguar equivalent just because it has metallic paint and has fully automatic climate control. and other luxury refinements, 30 percent more pressed chrome wheels. I mean, this made this car very, very exclusive, but compared to its rivals it was still good value for money. The similar performance mercedes 450 sel 6.9 weighed £22,999 making it more than double the price. this car and arguably it didn't fare its occupants as well as this car, that's what motor magazine had to say about it, road and track said similar things, they loved the v12 and didn't like the reliability or the lack of it and its construction.

The quality is too much but that was unfortunately as we know British Leyland at the time but just the details of this car are painfully subtle, elegant and charming and this car is a very very rare survivor. I wouldn't like to give a figure of how many. of them left, this is the series 2 car, but I guess maybe 30 um, maybe 40 and this car is all original, all the chrome is still beautiful, no pitting, no nothing, it's absolutely perfect as the day it was built. in 1977 this is the original factory paint with its beautiful original gold line which was an optional but standard extra on the vandenpla, it is actually cellulose and if you polish it some of the paint comes off with a cloth so if you look at the driver, He drove Rolls-Royces and Daimlers, as this was when it was new, what used to happen was some of the paint would come off with the fabric and being a metallic finish, it would have tiny little bits of aluminum on it. the paint and if you polish it, what are you doing is actually polishing some of the aluminum flakes that are actually touching the surface and the reason they became dull was because the aluminum would start to rust with the outside air in the paint and it would go dull so really your chauffeur could polish them with a coat of polish and that would last a long time and keep them from rusting but eventually you would have to polish it again and they actually wore off if you look at a driven car by a chauffeur like this in the 70's. give me the jaguar rolls royce, anything you can see on the edges, often bits of primer if it's the original paint because it's been chauffeur buffed or buffed to keep it shiny, keep that shine These days we don't have that problem because the paints are clear on the base, so they lack finish, which means that the metal never gets close to fresh air or the atmosphere, but all this to say that it is notable that this car has survived, that the paint has not worn off and could do so. with a polish now, but we don't polish it that often because every time we do what I said, we take a little bit of paint off it and it has a limited amount of paint, but for a car to survive like this in this original unrestored condition from 1977 it's amazing the car has only done 21,000 miles since new original documented fabulous it has to be the best ghost double six pillar in the world of its time anyway everything about the car the woodwork inside the leather the the carpets, every last one detail other than a tire, belt or hose are original, it really is a remarkable piece of kit and don't forget that this V12 powered car could run well over 140 miles per hour than in the 1970s. a four-door saloon, it probably moved at 150 with the later fuel injected engine like this one, here it has 295 brake horsepower, similar figure for torque and it was on the low end where it needs it, also, this car to describe it was effortless, really effortless. and almost silent, it was actually the most refined car in the world, it was more refined even than a rolls-royce silver shadow or silver shadow ii and it had soft suspension because it had a fairly soft ride by American standards, the ride was firm for the Europeans. standards, it was super soft, but actually within reason it could also move.

A fantastic achievement. Really the wonder of Jaguar's achievement with this was that they took the V12 engine to a whole new level of people, really to a whole new number of people because they did them by the thousands and uh Jaguar were very clever with this engine. It started out as a four-cam engine like the Lamborghini and then its Ferrari equivalents, but it took up a lot of space, the top end of the engine with the four cams and all the carburetors and everything, um, they abandoned it because they originally intended it to be a competition engine Le Man winner, so it was initially developed in the 1950s and then on the xj13, of which there was only one originally, they decided when they changed. the project and walter hassan and his team turned it into a road car engine and discovered that it could be more efficient, more torquey and smoother and more refined down low, more docile if they actually ditched the twin cam heads and went for so it is called a heron's head. which is a very very simple combustion chamber design, the cylinder heads are actually flat with the valves in a line, intake, exhaust, intake, exhaust, etc. and the combustion chamber is actually on the top of the piston, it's on the piston crown and that was one of the secrets to the super smooth success of this engine some people even went so far as to say that it was the best internal combustion engine made in the 1970s, not everyone who owned them would agree with that because they had the usual British Leyland unreliability problems. but if you got a good one they were great, if you got a bad one they were terrible, there was nothing in between except the v12 engine, very quiet, very refined, beautiful power delivery, not top notch or frenetic or anything like that, starts from idle. and yes, we are going to run it again on 12 cylinders and then take it out for a run.

Well we have taken the car out of storage, it has been here for a while so we need to give the car and myself some life. I have verified that it is running on nine cylinders, two down on this bank and one down on that one. Check the ignition system. Everything's fine. We have a very strong spark on all 12 cylinders. Pretty basic stuff in this era of engines. A remarkably good ignition coil. Uh um, does it work for the entire engine? You have a distributor, the big Lucas distributor, k here in the middle with 12 ignition wires that go obviously to the firing order of the spark plugs, so everything that works, this is where the tricky part comes because, um, I mean .

I've run into all kinds of problems, I've had situations where people were driving years ago with these nine-cylinder engines thinking they were fine and a little underperforming and they brought them in, I remember. an xjs i made in the 1980s and it ran nine pots and was the trigger disc on the distributor. The 12 things did not activate the ignition system. The ignition system on this is a very old electronic ignition, it's called the Lucas Opus system. oscillating pickup system or as it was more commonly known opelus because it failed on a regular basis um regular occurrence so anyway this one is okay so it's not like what I'm going to do now is some old trick because I suspect that some of the injectors are not working.

They don't work, they have clogged the fuel injectors. The Jaguars intended this engine to be fuel injected but it started life with the pretty horrible four Stromberg carburetors and they are difficult to synchronize and a beak to get it absolutely right you can zoom them in and they are fine but to achieve perfection it takes time the induction system was a horrible compromise on the v12 carburetor much more elegant on the fuel injection system gas gets to the right place at the right time, in the right amount and in the right way I don't atomize a puddle at the bottom of the manifold intake that suddenly sucked, so everything is fine, but the problem is that I suspect that at least two of the three problems on this are injectors that do not activate, so I have a little trick to rejuvenate them and bring them back to life, we have a 12 volt power here and I'm going to pull the trigger cable.

This is one of the offending cylinders here, number four on this bank, so I'm going to remove it carefully because these rubber covers are 43 years old and they're a little delicate, I don't want to damage them particularly, it goes off, it comes and just We'll run the 12 volt power to the terminals and see if we can get a tune. of this injector just put it very carefully on the terminals there is nothing there just when I thought the injector was actually stuck so I'm going to keep doing this because normally a good 12 volt direct feed frees them up yeah there it is. that's working great now that it's back to life that's cool that was stuck that injector was stuck it wasn't working at first i can feel it actually you just feel a slight vibration you can't hold the wire because it burns the injector windings it's designed to run for a fraction of a second, only, of course, the fuel injectorfuel, so that's one less and now I'm going to try the others and see if that's the problem, I suspect it is at this age. of the car, so that's the result, we may even have a 12 cylinder engine, but hey, I did the two injectors on this bench, number two was not working either, so I brought that one back to life and also the number one in this bank. similarly, it was actually injecting, but very, very lightly and very sporadically, so it has a nice loud click and now ticks as it should.

We have plugged it back in, hopefully the engine will now start and obviously it will sound in the 12's yes I understand that correctly, yes I am one of the saddest people in the world or a very demanding car enthusiast, one or the other , but I would go so far as to say that I really like these cars if I could. one of the 30 greatest car collections ever made, would have one of these. I love the intoxicating, I mean, it's a luxurious cabin that's still charming even now, this beautiful almost mirror finished woodwork. Original from 43 years ago it's never been touched, we've put a new roof on it because the roof is too bad, they come off, so, look, I'll admit to doing that, but nothing else has been touched on this car and what just love is the um is the strange refinement of them um but the first time I rode in one uh I was lucky enough as a young boy a friend's dad had one and couldn't believe how quiet and smooth it was.

I mean it just glides and it really stuck with me, but also the performance it had, it was really, really, and it's still a fast car, obviously, it's nowhere near supercar performance then or now, but it can still move to um and to the car that really um, really the next car, the most refined car, I remember a friend gave me a 1993 Lexus LS 400 in the early 2000s because some things were starting to go wrong, nothing in against the car, a great car, but um. in a way and I was really impressed with the refinement of it, that V8 engine really raised the bar again, um, but you know it's, um, it's just a lovely car, the rev counter doesn't work.

I figured it will work because it usually does. bringing everything out of its slumber and I'm just letting the car warm up because the oil pressure is great, the oil pressure on these from the factory should be 63 pounds per square inch at 3000 rpm, uh, and this oil pressure is very very good. I know that the car is actually in very good condition, we have redone all the brakes, the brake disc rotors as they called them across the pond, and the rear ones are difficult to do, you have to drop everything the rear suspension assembly, the cradle to uh, to access them inside the brakes, but that's how they made them and that helps with a smooth ride because the brakes are not next to the wheels, it's less unsprung weight , as it's called, which makes the ride smoother, here we are.

The engine has warmed up but it seems like the tachometer hasn't because it still doesn't work but one of the most surprising things about this car to me is you know I'm a big fan of noise, vibration and nvh harshness , and this car. It was so refined in its time that it was the most refined car in the world, without exception, no Mercedes could not come close to it. A fantastic piece of machinery, a piece of engineering, although the 6.9 450 sl merc was um, couldn't come close to this in terms of suspension, uh with. um smoothness uh although it was a little more controlled um but this um just slides along it just floats and um that considering you have 300 horsepower almost five and a half liters five three four three cc v12 in front of you you could just I don't know , there were analogies in the car magazines about being blown by a turbine and of course a big electric motor, of course we've come to that now, but you know, it was just a revelation, this motor in the 1970s, but I'm going to drop it in this gearbox.

The GM 400 doesn't like to kick, but I'm going to coax it into first gear and we'll test the acceleration now that we have it running. Back on the 12 cylinders, there should be plenty of power, really quiet from the inside, but of course all of that happens on the outside, so we'll just open it up and there we go, beautiful, beautiful, smooth power, um, just . Immediately there is smooth, smooth power for a 43 year old car, it moves particularly for a large saloon, just beautiful and you are surrounded by this look, these lovely materials, this mirror finished burwal that is all original from 1977 and the random plot again you have the burr nut the standard jaguars and daimlers had the uh, slightly lower grade maybe granulated nut or not at all the burr on a walnut tree is only 18 inches across the entire trunk it's a little piece of the walnut tree that actually it has that beautiful bird as the Americans call it burred finish, which uh rolls was so loved by rolls-royce, even Mercedes in the 6.9 that I was talking about, uh, the standard furniture was burred walnut, um before the wood came along zobrano, which was so loved by Mercedes in the 1980s and This car again is absolutely almost silent, just beautiful, so again, we'll just turn on the taps and just savor that creamy cut glass, smooth V12 power and again the beauty of this car is that it has torque but it is not cami or it is very linear. the power delivery um it's there, wait, there it goes fabulous, fabulous, so smooth and so quiet, there's just a little bit of induction.

The raw jaguar went through a lot of trouble damping things down, you can barely hear it even at six thousand rpm. since that's when it shifted a little over six thousand into second gear, really negligible noise unless you're outside and we've also recorded the exhaust noise so you can hear a little bit of uh you can hear a little bit of that maybe when we turn this corner, we just open it again, beautiful, well, we are briefly looking at another car that we have here in the

workshop

at the same time, which is the coupe version of the jaguar xj12 or the double six, it never actually made this officially on the vandom platform so it's a poor relation but hardly still has the gorgeous shiny v12 engine but what's really interesting about this is like some cars from the 70's the bmw e9 the three liter csl , some American cars, um, it's got what's called pillarless construction, so you have these frameless doors, as they're called, with just the flip-up glass, just the window facing in and the same thing here and one of the truly magnificent achievements that Jaguar engineers achieved and I was privileged to have a visit from Ian Callum, Jaguar's head of design at the time, who explained to me that he actually exercised them quite a bit to create a window mechanism that creates the pillarless appearance which I'll show you in a minute, but also.

It's extremely good at wind suppression because obviously this is a little loose, that's how they should be, so how does it seal? A lot of intelligence is the answer we have these days in many cars like this, you have the windows down. a few millimeters when you open the door handle like a micro switch on the door handle to make the glass fall and then when you close it it goes up into a channel and this is to keep the wind noise out. The jaguar managed to do that. in the 1970s without all those tricks, but they did employ other tricks, so first I'm going to lower this window, which is pretty conventional, nothing terribly exciting about it, but this one is a little special, how about that? and this is where the pillarless engine and construction magazine is called, going back to that road test and other magazines of the time commented that even at high speeds on German autobahns at 130 miles per hour or more or even more, the windows they barely emitted a whisper of The wind noise is just part of the incredible package this car had in terms of almost superhuman refinement at the time, so yeah, really very special, now I'll roll up the window and very few of these actually work. correctly or at the speed at which they are intended to work, this one works quite often, they are sticky, clunky and slow, there is a rather complicated mechanism here that we have worked on and fine-tuned, it is a really very interesting aspect of the coupe.

The version of this car, of course, is as fast as the saloon, so now we can also roll up this window and close the car, and it's good for going 140 miles an hour without barely turning on the radio, as you do well, that concludes another Video of the

classic

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