Alloy Body XK120

When Jaguar unveiled the XK120 at the 1948 London Motor Show, it was a low-volume showpiece to introduce the twin-cam XK engine, William Lyons never expected to actually build many of them. Demand was so overwhelming that Jaguar had to transition from hand-formed aluminum bodies to pressed steel just to keep up. Only 242 cars ever wore the alloy shell, and this British Racing Green roadster is number 20 off that short list. Of those 242, just 54 were built in right-hand drive, which puts this car in extraordinarily rare company before you even get into its history.

And what a history it is. Completed on November 28, 1949, and shipped to Brylaws in Sydney by December 9th, this XK120 landed in Australia and immediately went racing. Its first owner, George Thame of Roseville, wasn't content to park it in a garage — he took it up Hawkesbury hillclimb, around the mountain at Bathurst, and through the Castrol 24 Hour trial. For context, Bathurst's Mount Panorama circuit in the early 1950s was an extremely dangerous place, run on public roads with minimal safety infrastructure. This car earned its stripes the hard way. It later made its way through Sydney dealerships, crossed into European hands via a German engineer named Roeder in 1969, passed through Stuttgart dealer Auto Reuter, and eventually landed Stateside via a restoration shop in Arizona before reaching its current California owner.

Today the car is immaculate — a word that gets thrown around loosely but appears justified here. It claimed a class award at the Amelia Island Concours, one of the most scrutinized concours events in North America, and then immediately went out and completed the 2025 Colorado Grand, a 1,000-mile rally through the Rockies. That combination — Amelia one season, a hard mountain rally the next — tells you this is a driver's car that's been properly restored and properly sorted, not a trailer queen dressed up for show. The XK inline-six is famously robust when maintained correctly, and the manual gearbox on these early cars rewards patience and deliberate inputs.

At $195,000, you're paying for provenance that most XK120s simply cannot match: documented race history at Bathurst, a paper trail stretching from Sydney to Stuttgart to Scottsdale, alloy bodywork that is genuinely irreplaceable, and a recent concours win paired with serious rally miles. This is car number 20 of 242. There will not be another one.