Fergus Walkinshaw and John Kane met while on a road rally. Both had a passion for fast cars and Jaguars. Fergus's link to the marque is obvious. His father was Tom Walkinshaw, the man behind TWR and JaguarSport. The man who took Jaguar to victory at Daytona, then Le Mans in 1988 and 1990, built the XJ220 and XJR-15 and ran the Group C programme successfully for Jaguar, taking the brand to World Sportscar Championship status.

Before all that - TWR revived ailing XJ-S sales in the early '80s by making the wafty big GT do things nobody could have imagined, like winning the Spa 24 Hours and Bathurst. TWR also created a line of XJ-S specials with body kits, performance upgrades, and bespoke interior accessories. These later morphed into an official collaboration with Jaguar under the ‘JaguarSport’ banner – resulting in the XJR-S and XJ40-based original XJR.

Fast-forward to 2024, the 40th anniversary of TWR's winning the European Touring Car Championship with the XJ-S. The TWR name has once again become synonymous with 'off the peg' XJ-Ss with mind-bending performance and styling.

Similarly, just as in 1984, the XJ-S has fallen off the radar somewhat in recent years. While values had grown steadily, the market has seemed to stop and plateau more recently. Moreover, a new generation of 'retro car' enthusiasts seems more obsessed with Porsche 'resto-mods' than with anything from Coventry. Car websites and social media channels are full of them, which is significant—as we will get to in a moment.

Fergus Walkinshaw and John Kane embarked on this exciting journey together to shake things up in the 'resto-mod' market and get the Jaguar name back out there amongst newer generations of fans. The results of that journey are frankly staggering!

To celebrate the monumental milestone of both our 100th episode and the start of a new series of Jaguar Enthusiast Podcasts, we took the show out in front of a live audience at Podium Place, Newbury. We were recording in Podium Paddock, the private members’ club that inhabits the mezzanine floor above TWR’s workshops. As we spoke, the new TWR SuperCat was being built and in a later episode, we will share our interview with Fergus Walkinshaw.

In this episode though, Richard West turns the tables on Wayne Scott, the usual presenter of the podcast, and instead puts him in the hot seat to be interviewed. It was a fun night reminiscing on the moments in Wayne’s life that led to him not only presenting the best Jaguar-focused podcast on the internet but also relaunching Jaguar Enthusiast Magazine as editor.

This was recorded earlier this year, in May 2024.