Final Flowering: 1974 Jensen-Healey

After the demise of the Austin-Healey 3000 in 1967, Kjell Qvale, the largest distributor of Austin-Healeys in the western United States, decided he needed a good replacement - around the same time Donald Healey was thinking the same thing.

 

Healey went to Jensen, who had built bodies for the now-discontinued Austin-Healey and made a larger GT of their own - the Interceptor. Qvale took a controlling interest in Jensen in 1970, and all three parties worked together to come up with the new car.

 

Donald (and son Geoffrey) Healey designed the chassis of what would become the Jensen-Healey, Hugo Poole and William Towns did the styling, with towns updating the car to include impact bumpers, then becoming mandatory in what would be the car's main market - the United States.

 

As with previous Healeys dating back to the forties, a proprietary engine was used. Various powerplants were tried - the Vauxhall 2.3, the Ford "Cologne" V6, the straight six from the BMW E9, but these powerplants couldn't be provided in time or numbers sufficient to build the cars, and the Vauxhall engine couldn't delivery the requisite performance. Saab and Porsche engines were also pondered.

 

After a chance meeting on a commuter train between some Jensen and Lotus executives, Colin Chapman was approached and volunteered his new 907 twin cam engine, which was still being developed. The 907 fit the car well and delivered good performance. This would prove a fateful decision.

 

The Jensen-Healey was introduced at the 1972 Geneva show, and was in production four months later. A year after that, almost 4,000 of them had been built.

 

And then came a one-two punch.

 

First came the 1973/1974 Opec crisis, which greatly impacted the sales of Jensen's lineup of sports cars, particularly the senior Interceptor, a big car that ran a Chrysler 440 V8 - an insanely thirsty vehicle by U.K. standards in the era of the three-day week.

 

Then came the unreliability of the Lotus 907, which, like the Triumph Stag V8, wasn't "fully cooked" at the time it was shopped to Jensen. The result of this was that the Jensen-Healey effectively beta-tested (to use a modern term) the engine for Lotus. The first year and a half of production saw many teething issues, largely centered on this engine.

 

By mid-1974, production was being cut back, and even the 1975 introduction of a closed coupe - the fastback Jensen GT - couldn't help lift sales. Half the workforce was layed off in 1975, and within a year Jensen was done.

 

The Jensen-Healey's teething troubles plagued it for many years with a bad reputation - and it isn't cheap to service, but it is a pretty good car when kept tuned and serviced, as were most of Jensen's products.

 

Jensen was briefly revived in the eighties for a small run of Interceptors, but this didn't amount to sustained production. In 2001, a new car, the S-V8, and a new version of the company appeared, but just 12 cars were made before that, too, went under - a victim of the early 2000s recession.

 

Special thanks to Ben J. for the photo op.

 

©2015 A. Kwanten.

 

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