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Club Corner: Daimler & Lanchester (Jaguar) Owners in New Zealand Spare Parts Club

10 April, 2016

 



The Daimler & Lanchester (Jaguar) Owners in New Zealand Spare Parts Club was founded back in 1971 by Gordon Somerville and the late Laurie Wason, and became an incorporated society in 1971.

Today the club, based in Christchurch, provides parts sales to members only, and has a wide inventory of spare parts, new and used, available in stock for most Daimler/Jaguar motor vehicles from Jaguar Mk1 and XK120 right through to modern Jaguars and Daimlers as well as Lanchester vehicles. The club carries approximately 3500 individual line items, all available ex stock for the above vehicles. The club also caters for more modern X-Type, S-Type, and XJ Jaguars.

The club is run by a group of volunteers, and is open for business and parts orders and information on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 8.30am to 1.00pm. The majority of orders ex stock are shipped the same day, with competitive overnight freight rates. The club can also provide hassle-free shipping from overseas for those hard-to-get parts, offering a price advantage for parts supply for more modern vehicles over most local suppliers.

Join the club

If you’re interested in joining one of New Zealand’s largest one-marque car clubs, then join the Daimler & Lanchester (Jaguar) Owners in New Zealand Spare Parts Club.
Visit the website — daimjag.org.nz — for further information and to download a membership application form.

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This article originally appeared in New Zealand Classic Car Issue No. 299. You can pick up a print copy or a digital copy of the magazine below:




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Janspeed recreates the Jaguar sports car

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Thankfully, a few of these cars made it to New Zealand, the odd one being imported from the UK over the years. However, the 1988 British Racing Green example owned by Bill Slater in Upper Hutt was originally sold as a standard car but converted using the full Janspeed kit by the first owner within a couple of years of buying it.
Bill has owned a few other Jaguars. In fact, after he sold his Jaguar XJ12 in 2018, he found himself pining for another and, when the XJ-S came up for sale, he could not resist it. Having just sold the V12, he was not expecting much from the six-cylinder car other than more reliability and it being cheaper to keep on the road. Naturally, he had heard of the influence Janspeed had on the marque, but it was not until he took the car for a test drive that he became aware of just how superior it was to the car he had just sold. The price of a second-hand Janspeed XJ-S and that of a standard 3.6 XJ-S is quite comparable, making the Janspeed version an incredible bargain, even more so in comparison with other performance classic cars — or even modern cars, for that matter — which cost far more bucks for the bang.

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Deven, a digital content producer in his 20s, says it was the rear-drive Nissan and Toyota drift cars that fired his imagination in his not-so-distant youth and soon had him wanting one of his own. However, like most of us, he had to start in something less glamorous – in his case, a 1997 Mitsubishi Galant. After that, he bought a four-litre V8 1991 Toyota Soarer, a big change from the Mitsubishi.
“It was my daily driver, and it wasn’t that bad to run back when petrol was affordable,” he says.
When he got fed up with filling it up, Deven bought a 1989 Ford Laser sedan, a 1.3-litre five-speed manual, to be his daily driver. It’s in very good condition, bought from a careful older driver, and he still runs it – although he will occasionally also drive the latest in a series of Nissan Laurel sedans. His current one, from 1993, has done the lowest number of kilometres yet, at 183,000. It has the single-cam version of the engine in his Skyline.
“I’ve had four different versions of that car. It was just a car I always liked. It’s really comfortable, quite luxurious. I bought it from a 90-year-old in Hamilton. It’s in mint condition, and everything is standard.”