Jensen Interceptor SRT8

Jensen – argh the frustration – it spent much of the summer at AAA dialing out all the niggles. The steering is sorted, electrical gremlins have been eradicated. All the warning lights dealt with, windows working – basically all sorted. After a few roadtests it passed the RTA tests again, hopefully with the engine swap registered this time so it won’t need to go for a special check next year. So all sorted, I drive it home and it still cuts out randomly.

What to do, reading online I think it is a 300c SRT8 issue, there are a few reports and the solution seems to be either clean all contacts or swap out the ecu. So off to Saja’a I will go.

It just hits your confidence when driving it, you are waiting for it to stall – which is often doesn’t. If I can get this sorted then the car will become a great daily driver – it is really that close.

Success – we finally got to the bottom of the Jensen stalling, had I mentioned that it stalled. It was massively frustrating and killed and pleasure in driving it. Always sat at lights focused on the idle waiting for the inevitable, even when it didn’t come. It just driving along and it stuttered and died. We tried everything – different ECU’s I went through 3, changed other control modules, cleaned the injectors, some people pointed to the key barrel on the 300c being an issue… we chased and chased. Eventually it was indeed a Chrysler 300c inherited problem, but not one we’d expected. Some wistful googling threw up some articles talking about issues with the fuel tank breather valve causing cutouts etc – turns out despite the Jensen having a custom tank, all the fitting were 300c and we’d inherited that problem. Not wanting to tempt fate, but we have stalled since.

Luxury – the orange interior, albeit a stunning job, never quite gelled with me. Also the dash needed attention, the lip above the centre console has shrunk and pulled back and attempts to fix it left it looking worse. I also felt the SRT8 seats were simply too big for the car. The modern dash already sits deeper into the cabin, then add the depth of these seats and it made things a bit cramped, both in legroom and headroom. I sourced some smaller Corvette C6 seats and sent it all to local legend Colin Philips to work his magic – sadly it was probably one of his last projects as shortly after he closed to the business to focus on his core activities. Colin and team worked through the whole car, black napa leather and black alcantara throughout. It’s now a much better place to be.

That centre console is still causing problem though, not as bad and I’m sure something Colin would have fixed if still operating, but something I’ll have to get round to at some point, but for now its seat time and enjoy it.