One of the clues in today’s New York Times “The Mini” is, “There are roughly ten million billion (10^16) of these in a grain of salt.” (Of course, the answer is “atoms.”) That’s a lot, but have you ever stopped to consider how many beautiful cars you know little or nothing about are just sitting at car shows, waiting for you to discover them? It’s surely not ten million billion, but the clear message is this: Get out there and explore some car shows wherever you live, because you may find a handsome, well-proportioned grand tourer like this 1960 Jensen 541R — a car that I was aware of, but only peripherally.
By the time the above 541 prototype came around in 1953, brothers Richard and Alan Jensen had been in charge of Jensen Motors Limited for decades. They had gotten a contract to build the Austin-Healey 100, and their connection with Austin also provided the use of the 3,993 cc Austin “D-Series” inline-six for Jensen-badged cars. Jensen designer Eric Neale designed an aluminum body and brand-new chassis for the first 541 (which is now in the collection of the Tampa Bay Automobile Museum), using the aforementioned Austin running gear and triple carburetors. Soon afterward, Richard Jensen became intrigued by fiberglass as a low-cost material for body construction, and indeed the production-bodied 541s all had fiberglass bodies.
The Austin engine was the same four-liter six that was used in such cars as the 1959 Austin Princess IV saloon pictured above, which is a car that you never see in the United States, but I still wouldn’t mind owning. That reminds me — there’s a scale model out there that I’ve been meaning to buy.
The 541 was joined by the 541 Deluxe in 1956 and the 541R in 1957; the main difference in the later models was the adoption of Dunlop disc brakes on all four wheels. With a 150-horsepower version of the Austin DS7 (later DS5) engine with triple SU carburetors, the Jensen was a proper GT car for its day. My copy of The Complete Catalog of British Cars: 1895-1975 certainly based its performance statistics on Autocar’s January 1958 road test of a 541R. Not only could it complete the quarter-mile in 18.5 seconds and reach a top speed of 127.5 miles per hour, it could also deliver reasonable fuel mileage when not being driven by leadfooted hooligans. While I don’t have a copy of the Autocar road test itself, the reported 18 miles per gallon is not bad, even if it was recorded in Imperial gallons (that would be 14.9881 miles per U.S. gallon if that is the case).
The interior of our featured 541R is as sporting-yet-luxurious-yet-British as you’d expect from a low-volume GT car; everything has a vaguely aeronautical feel about it, as all high-end British cars seemed to have at the time. The shifter is connected to a Moss four-speed manual transmission with an electric Laycock overdrive.
Aside from the disc brakes, the 541’s undercarriage was not terribly exotic, with nice rack-and-pinion steering up front but leaf springs and a live rear axle out back. Still, most people in the late ’50s and early ’60s weren’t expecting their posh GT car to have an unpronounceable rear suspension design.
Eric Neale’s design proved to be one of Jensen’s best, and the same basic shape continued through 1963 with the 541S (below). It was handsome and unique at the same time, a hard coup to pull off. The huge license plate nacelle, the jutting rear window, the wraparound bumpers and the 300SL-like fender eyebrows are all a little discordant, but it all works.
It would be perhaps a little too gracious to say the same thing about the 541’s successor, the CV8:
As the ’60s dawned, Jensen knew they were going to need some more firepower, so they dropped the Austin six and began using big-block Chrysler V8s, which became something of a tradition with the big Jensen coupes. The popular-for-a-minute-in-Britain angled headlights only lasted a few years.
Of course, Jensen is probably best known for the Interceptor (the second Jensen of that name, the first having been introduced as a 1950 model), which was a steel-bodied replacement for the CV8 wearing styling by Carrozzeria Touring. It was produced all the way through 1976, when Jensen Motors ceased production of their beautiful big coupe, along with the Jensen-Healey. The rest is all businessperson talk, but in essence, the Jensen we know and love ended there.
And that leaves us with some little-known but fantastic British coupes. I caught this one at the Mad Dogs & Englishmen car show at Gilmore Car Museum in western Michigan in 2024, and I can’t remember seeing another. You can’t blame me for ogling it. If you can find one on the market, they’re surprisingly affordable, although I can imagine that finding parts is a nightmare, as fewer than 200 examples of the 541R were built. One project car sold for $14,000 on Bring a Trailer last March, and nicer examples, while out of my price range given my expansive collection of ten-footers, are not exactly bank-breakers.
I wonder if someone makes a die-cast version.
Related Reading
Automotive History: British Deadly Sins (High-Brow Hybrids, Part 3) – Jensen-Healey, The Double-Barreled Deadly Sin (by Tatra87)
Those B.A.T. photos are horrific .
Pop riveted floors and a failed tranny mount, I can only imagine what other horrors awaited the winning bidder .
This is mostly a good looking car, the rear view is just too strange but I bet it’s a fun driver .
-Nate
Just a note regarding not seeing an Austin Princess in The U.S. In 1968, while I was living in Bridgeport, CT, a repair shop in the adjacent town of Fairfield, has a Princess on the lot awaiting repairs. I looked, I looked, and I looked.
Apparently, I missed the Mad Dogs show last year. Didn’t miss it in 23. Here’s the same car, that year.
I was there this year, and the Jensen was there again. Stunning car.
BTW, there was also a Daimler SP250, a car that I can’t recall ever seeing in the metal, er, fiberglass.
I’ve seen a few SP250s, and they’re so weird that I love them. I remember seeing at least one at the vintage races at Waterford Hills 15 or 20 years ago. Good stuff!
I didn’t make it to the show this year; Gilmore is a bit of a hike for me (almost 6 hours round trip), so we go once a year or so. It’s too bad I don’t live closer; they have a lot of interesting events.
…Gilmore is a bit of a hike for me (almost 6 hours round trip)
Closer to two and a half hours, each way, from metro Detroit, for me. But an easy slam down I-94. It’s easier for me than getting to the Packard Proving Grounds in Utica. Being retired, I can drive to the Gilmore on consecutive days, like the German show on Saturday, then the Mad Dogs on Sunday, because I can snooze all week.
“Gilmore is a bit of a hike for me”
I live in SE Wisconsin, so Gilmore is a once-a-year trip for me. I made it an overnighter to catch the German and Brit cars. I would go more often if there was an economical way to not go through Chicago (the Lake Express ferry to Muskegon is NOT cheap). That said, the Kalamazoo area is great; the Air Zoo is a fantastic air museum. Last time I was there, one of the attendants let me climb into their Ford Tri-motor.
.I was there this year, and the Jensen was there again. Stunning car.
So many neat things at the “Mad Dogs”. A Reliant Scimitar shows up from time to time. Jensen Healey GTs. I tend to walk past the fields full of MGs, Jags, and Triumphs, and head for the “everything else” area. Then, there was the year a Meadows Friskysport showed up.
Not unknown but rarely seen, and yeah dont look underneath, the stylish part is on top and inside try not to look at how they built it,
The big Austins they were built from used to be around in small numbers but are mostly gone now either into scrapyards or collections.
Great catch! Like you, I was aware of these, but I don’t think I’d have been able to identify what this was by just seeing it.
Very interesting details – a seemingly random collection of design themes, but it pulls itself together nicely. One question: Those lights on the C-pillars – are those turn signals? They’re in a mighty odd location, but the way they bulge out, I suppose they can be seen from behind. Just curious if anyone knows.
An Aston Martin DB5, an MGB GT and a Volvo P1800 walk into a bar….
No, seriously, that’s a very cool ride, but it did remind me of James Bond’s car when I first saw it.
Speaking of that, just the other day a guy saw me get out of my 1800 and asked if that was the car in the James Bond movie. I have a really bad feeling that this is going to be a regular occurrence.
https://www.curbsideclassic.com/cars-of-a-lifetime/my-newly-acquired-1967-volvo-1800s-is-that-one-of-those-james-bond-cars/
Sounds like you and your car have Bonded…
I prefer the look of the 541S with its more conventional mesh grille. I assume the ‘blank panel’ on the silver 541R is a movable louvre to let air through when needed – it just looks weird. But then there’s that over-busy number plate surround making for one highly discordant rear end.
But the CV-8: ugh!
I’m not familiar with the D-series, but I’d assume the Chrysler V8 wouldn’t have weighed a lot more than the Austin six; the C-series was already a heavy lump for its size, and this was a third bigger capacity…
The 541S grille does help, but the poor CV-8’s face will always look like a cat mid-technicolor yawn.
The Tampa Bay Museum prototype car is one I’ve not seen before. It looks a good deal better than the production model, with those wheel arch brows much more elegant, and the rear window and boot entirely better. I presume compromises were needed for forming it from fibreglass. A pity, because the 541’s fall quite way short of greatness as they are. (There are about 18 of them in this country, with a handful from new, so I have seen a few close-up).
Still, a nice find, and left-hand drive too, so possibly a US original?
Here’s a link to that ’58 Autocar test.
https://www.jcc.ch/fileadmin/user_upload/Jensen_Modelle/541/Artikel/541R_AUTOCAR_58.pdf
Thank you for the link!