Jaguar SS 100: the pre-war sports car that named the marque (1936–1939)

Before there was a Jaguar company, there was the SS 100 (written SS100 in most registers and auction catalogues), and it already had the Jaguar name. William Lyons’ pre-war sports car was a short, low, fast open two-seater that looked and went like cars costing far more, and it is the car in which the whole Jaguar story, value, beauty and speed for the money, first came fully together.

William Lyons and the SS years

Lyons’ firm grew out of the Swallow Sidecar Company and moved through the early 1930s from coachbuilt bodies into cars of its own, the SS1 and SS2. These were striking, low-slung machines sold at prices that undercut anything that looked as expensive. By the mid-1930s the company, now SS Cars, was ready to put its name to something faster and more focused.

The thread running through all of it was Lyons himself, a proprietor with an extraordinary eye for line and value who styled his cars by judging full-size mock-ups. The promise was always the same: a car that looked like money and cost much less. The SS 100 made that promise sporting.

The SS 100

Launched in 1936, the SS 100 put a shortened chassis under a minimal, elegant two-seat body, with cycle-style wings, a low stance and an overhead-valve six-cylinder engine developed with the help of the gas-flow specialist Harry Weslake. In 2.5-litre form it was quick; in the 3.5-litre form of 1938 it could reach the 100 mph its name promised, a genuinely fast car for the money.

It was never built in large numbers, around 300 in total, and it was as much a flagship and a competition car as a volume product. It rallied and raced with success, and it gave the young marque exactly the glamorous, fast image Lyons wanted. Today it is among the most desirable pre-war British sports cars of all.

The competition record

The SS Jaguar 100, to give the car its full period title, earned its reputation the sporting way: works and private entries collected wins and class awards in the RAC Rally, the Alpine Trial and the Welsh Rally through the late 1930s, and the model set competitive times in sprints and hillclimbs wherever owners entered it. A streamlined one-off coupe shown in 1938 hinted at grander ambitions, and post-war the surviving cars kept racing in club events for decades. That record, modest in scale but genuine, is a large part of why the roughly 300 originals stand so far above their many imitators today, and why period competition history multiplies an already serious price whenever it can be documented.

The SS Jaguar saloons

Alongside the sports car came the cars that carried the volume. The SS Jaguar saloons, introduced in 1935 and 1936, were handsome, well-appointed four-doors with the same six-cylinder engines, and they undercut their rivals so heavily on price that buyers struggled to believe the figures. They established the saloon side of the business that, after the war, produced the Mark V and the cars that followed.

Both the saloons and the SS 100 shared the formula and the new name. It was here, in the late 1930s, that “Jaguar” first came to mean a fast, beautiful car sold for less than it looked worth.

From SS to Jaguar

The Jaguar name was a model name through the late 1930s; the company was still SS Cars. After the Second World War the SS initials carried an obvious and unwelcome association, and in 1945 the shareholders renamed the business Jaguar Cars after its best-known model. The SS 100 and the SS Jaguar saloons are therefore early Jaguars in everything but the badge on the building, the direct ancestors of the XK120 and everything that came after.

Owning and buying: genuine versus replica

This is a car where the first question is authenticity. Genuine SS 100s are rare and extremely valuable, and the shape has been recreated many times on various chassis, so a buyer must establish beyond doubt that a car is real, with the correct chassis, running gear and a documented history. Expert verification is essential at this level.

A genuine car is a serious pre-war machine to own, demanding the techniques and maintenance of its era and the support of the marque’s specialists, much of it the wider business of running a classic car taken to its most rarefied. For most enthusiasts the SS 100 is a car to admire at events rather than to buy, which is part of its mystique.

Value and where it sits

A genuine SS 100 is a six-figure classic, the best original 3.5-litre cars reaching well beyond, while replicas sell for a small fraction and should never be mistaken for the real thing. It is the pre-war jewel of the Jaguar story and one of the defining British sports cars of the 1930s, the car in which the marque found its voice.

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