Owning a Jaguar XJR is a stupid idea, no matter how cheap the insurance

THE woman from Confused sounded a bit, well, confused. When would I be interested in taking up insurance on a supercharged V8 Jaguar?

It's very nearly November, which in the Life On Cars household means enduring the expensive ordeal of insuring both a £300 Rover and a Mazda MX-5 at roughly the same time. With each year of driving around and not claiming for the cost of a crumpled heap of metal in a hedge my insurance has got a little bit cheaper, but I'm still paying more the cost of a year's insurance for the ancient Rover than the cost of the car itself.
Slightly depressed by that realisation, I turned to that opium of car enthusiasts, eBay, and immediately came up with a far more suitable banger. All 3.2 litres of a Jaguar XJ8, and mine for £750. I very nearly headed for the Buy It Now button, but then I clocked the wheelarch rot and a service history with more gaps than a jeans shop. So I moved on to the next offering.

Big mistake - I'd found a tidy T-reg Jaguar XJR, which back in the day would have set golfers back a cool £51,000 but was here, in the great Arthur Daley forecourt of cyberspace, for £1,750. True, it had 124,000 miles on the clock but it looked to be in good nick, and the thought of having 370bhp at my leather-lined, wood-trimmed disposal seemed tempting enough to look past the prospect of getting less than 20 to the gallon. It is, Jag people will know, a fabulous car; refined and graceful enough to wear the Big Cat badge with pride, but blessed with a 4.0 litre V8, beefy alloy wheels and sports trim and suspension for added zestfulness. Petrolhead heaven, basically.

Drunk with delight, I idiotically went to an insurance comparision website to find out how much it'd cost a twentysomething male working in journalism - which in insurance terms is about as dangerous a profession as they come - to make sure it was beyond my aspirations of automotive avarice. It wasn't. Someone as hamfisted as me could insure Coventry's finest, fully comp, for a shade over a grand, which unlike the Rover is less than the car itself cost.

I woke up the following morning and knocked the idea on the head, having realised in the cold light of day that having a supercharged Jag outside the house would be a stupid, expensive idea.

The only problem is, the insurance companies keep ringing me up now and suggesting otherwise!

UPDATE: An earlier version of this article included a picture of the special edition XJR 100 rather than the standard XJR. This has since been amended.

How to pick up a classic luxury Rover for peanuts

YOU DON'T park a Rover P6. You dock it, like a luxury liner.

A luxury liner, as it turns out, that my mate's just sailed into port for less than a grand. He was going to buy a brace of Triumph Spitfires long past their sell-by-date as a job lot, but decided at the last minute he'd rather go for the leather-lined barge from the Sixties instead. I don't blame him, because what the old girl lacks in sportiness and open top thrills it makes up for in style and caddish character.

Naturally, at that sort of money it needs a bit of work but it was still in good enough nick for me to take a pew in the leather-lined captain's chair and fire it up, treating both us to one of motoring's greatest soundtracks - the baritone burble of Rover's 3.5 litre V8. The car door Vinnie Jones used to such brutal effect in Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels was a P6's, so Guy Ritchie obviously agrees with me that the old Rover's got a geezerish swagger to its style, but that engine note and the laid-back performance it brings is undoubtedly the P6's best feature.

It's also the reason why I wouldn't - no, couldn't - buy one, because one of my all time favourite saloons has also got an unquenchable thirst for the jungle juice. The only P6 I'd ever want is the V8 version, but because I can't afford to run something that struggles to get 15 miles to the gallon the ocean liner Rover is out of the question. Helpfully, the Government's agreed to suspend its plans to raise fuel duty, but for P6 perusers it just isn't enough.

I hopped back into my own Rover, the rather more realistic 200 Series of Hyacinth Bucket vintage, and quickly realised there is a way to blend the reliability (don't laugh) of the later cars, engineered with BMW and Honda help, with the Midsomer Murders looks of the old ones. You might laugh now but the Rover 75 is motoring's bargain of the moment.

It's got all the style and comfort of the old P5s and P6s but thanks to Rover's turbulent tumble towards extinction and the car itself having all the street cred of a pensioner's bus pass good 75s can be readily picked up for less than a grand. Trendy it isn't but it's a lot of car for the money.

More importantly, the 75 is tomorrow's P6 - I'll eat my own shoes if collectors aren't fighting for the good ‘uns in 15 years time. Get yours now while they're still peanuts...

The class of 1994 was brilliant for car classifieds

SO THE Champion's 18 this week. Your favourite local paper can, among other things, legally get the drinks in without worrying about being asked for its ID by the bloke behind the bar.

I've been celebrating the anniversary by working away on the special birthday supplement you'll find delivered with this week's edition - a task which meant trawling through the thousands of papers we've put out over the years, to uncover all those juicy front page splashes hidden away in our secretive and extensive archives.

It's a pity then I ended up hooked on a rather different bit of Champion history - the car classifieds. If, like me, you're one of those weirdos who still finds the Auto Trader strangely absorbing (and I don't mean the coarse, inky paper it's printed on either), then you'd love looking through the secondhand bargains Champ readers were prepared to flog you all those years ago.

Yes, it's true that when the first ever Champion was published the number one single was Mariah Carey's tragically bad cover of Without You, but I would have put up with that to buy a clean Capri Ghia for £550. The same car today, now considered a bit of classic, is four or five times that. You could take your pick from a host of very tidy original Minis for between £500 and £600, and - if you weren't that desperate to get anywhere in a hurry - a slightly ropey Citroen 2CV with eight months' MOT was yours for £250. If only there was a way of somehow transporting these then-unwanted motors from 1994 to 2012, because all these old stagers are very sought after these days.

Even more annoyingly cheap were 1994's brand new arrivals. Would sir be tempted, for instance, by a lovely Alfa 155, which in The Champion's first week was yours for just £13,577? The same money these days would struggle to get you into a mid-range (and much smaller) MiTo. I know the class of 1994 were only just being introduced to electric windows and airbags, but they still got a lot more for their money then you do now. You could also experience the thrills of driving a Fiat Coupe or a Volkswagen Corrado without having to peel the boiled sweets out of the ashtrays. Then again, if you'd ventured into a Ford showroom at the time there's a very good chance you'd have ended up lumbered with an Escort.

So to celebrate The Champion's big anniversary I've decided things were better in the good old days. Maybe I'll think differently in 18 years' time...