How One Man’s Fascination Led to a Lifetime With a Rare 1954 Jaguar XK120 SE

Staten Island, more properly called by its official name, Richmond, is New York City’s fifth borough, as its residents sometimes proclaim it, and easily the most suburbanized of the city’s precincts. Unlike most of the other boroughs, traditional car culture booms here. The island is dotted with huge developments of two-family houses, each with its own driveways. 

The rest of the city’s transportation may be focused on mass transit, but automotive life, of a sort, still exists energetically on Staten Island. It’s quite common for the Staten Island Expressway to be at a standstill with traffic trying to get to Brooklyn or New Jersey, by way of the Goethals and Verrazano-Narrows bridges. The boulevards are crowded with retail and dining establishments. The West Shore Expressway, which starts where the Outerbridge Crossing lands from Perth Amboy, New Jersey, was long a strip of combat for New York’s notorious street racers. NASCAR tried, and failed, to build a superspeedway on the north shore of the Island. And it’s been nearly half a century since stock cars bulled their way around tiny Weissglass Stadium off Hylan Boulevard, one of Staten Island’s main thoroughfares. 

So, Staten Island, as you see, has always been peripherally about cars, even when they had to take a ferryboat to get there before the Verrazano bridge opened in 1964. A quarter of the way through the 21st century, it’s also sometimes about old cars, the kind that affectionate owners pamper and parade, at least as much as the island’s crowded street network will allow.  

One of the members of that obscure but proud community is Peter Principe, a retired electrician, who also likes to show off his old car from time to time. Only the automobile he’s kept is a bonafide sporting landmark, especially in its native United Kingdom. Peter’s car is a 1954 Jaguar XK120SE, the “SE” standing for Special Equipment, from the final year of the storied XK120’s production. Peter says flatly that in a borough crowded with cars, his is the only early XK120 you’ll find. 

The Jaguar reflects a family tradition, too: It’s one of a succession of old cars that Peter’s father would happily buy from a local mechanic and use to tool around the Principes’ neighborhood in Brooklyn, known as Bensonhurst, where Peter was raised. Except for a repaint, and replacement leather in the cockpit, the Open Two Seater (OTS), as it’s known in Jaguar lore, is largely original and apparently has been since Peter’s father, Ralph, first bought it from that local garage, probably in 1969. Ever since then, the Jaguar has led a charmed and very unique existence. 

“I’ve got the only 120 Jaguar on Staten Island. Nobody else has one,” said Peter, who moved from Brooklyn and now lives in the Huguenot area of Richmond. “My father worked for Con Edison as an electrician for his whole career in Brooklyn; my mother was a homemaker. My father was friends with an auto mechanic on McDonald Avenue and I guess back then, in the early Sixties, he was with this gentleman named Reggie who owned the shop. I don’t know his last name, but his garage was called GCS Auto Repairs. They were friendly, so my father would go there on Saturdays and drink coffee, and there were cars that would come through Reggie’s hands that my father knew were for sale.” 

The first such car to enter the Principe household was a 1941 Plymouth coupe, which Peter thinks his father bought around 1967 just to drive around Bensonhurst, rather than restore. Same for the next car, which Peter believes was an early Citroën DS sedan that he remembers most for its hydraulics and their controls, like its brake button and ride-height adjustment. After that was a 1967 Mercury Cougar. Ralph Principe bought cars from Reggie continuously from the mid-Sixties through about 1973, including the XK120.  

The XK120 genuinely transformed both sports motoring and the British motor industry. Introduced at the London Motor Show of 1948, the XK120 was the first new Jaguar sports car since the prewar SS and at its debut, also the world’s fastest production sports car. The XK120, with the first 242 examples bodied in aluminum, was a showcase for the William Heynes-designed, regal-appearing 3.4-liter twin-cam six, which boasted hemispherical combustion chambers.  

The very first car fittingly went to silver screen icon Clark Gable. Subsequently, XK120s would run admirably in competitive events everywhere from the Sarthe to the Coupe des Alpes to the streets of Watkins Glen. A total of 12,055 were produced by Coventry over the model’s lifespan. In 1954, the 120’s finale in the marketplace, a fixed-head coupe example became the first foreign-built car to win a NASCAR race, held not far from Staten Island at Linden Airport in New Jersey, in a contest that allowed foreign-built cars. Toyota would be the next non-U.S. nameplate to win in NASCAR. 

For the XJ120’s finale that same year, Jaguar introduced a performance version, the SE, specifically aimed at American buyers in the last months of production. The most obvious change was the enlarged 6.00-16 wire wheels that replaced the stock disc wheels and hubcaps. The SE also got inch-thicker torsion bars, a true dual-exhaust system, and higher-lift camshafts. They helped boost the XK120’s 3,442cc six, with dual SU H6 carburetors, to 180 horsepower, 20 more than non-SE versions. The SE comprised a limited percentage of the 1,966 examples of the OTS that Jaguar produced that year; the exact number is unclear. The one in the Principe household was sold new by the famed Max Hoffman dealership in Manhattan to a buyer from Long Island.  

It’s also unclear what happened after that, except that the Jaguar ended up in Reggie’s inventory in the late 1960s. Peter believes it was repainted around this time from its original cream to a shade of what he thinks is Mercedes-Benz white, given that Reggie was also selling used Benzes around the same time. The interior had also been redone in the past. Peter’s father was clearly smitten, as he paid $1,200 for it, a significant sum at the time. Peter recalls a trip to Long Island carburetor maven Joe Curto for maintenance work on the dual SUs. “He said, ‘Your father paid too much. It was probably worth $800 to $900 then.’” 

The XK120 is pretty much the same as when Ralph rumbled home with it in 1969. “Other than the repaint, all I’ve done is just keep it running and rebuild what it needed,” Peter explains. “The odometer reads about 33,000 miles, and I believe that to be accurate. The odometer does work. If my father put a couple of hundred miles on it a year, it was a lot. A lot of people look at the car and say it looks great; others say it’s a candidate for a full restoration. It’s all in the eye of the beholder.” 

Remember what we said about Staten Island and traffic congestion? That situation is what keeps Peter’s XK120 as a low-mileage, carefully maintained example. It’s been his since the 1970s, when Peter took an inheritance from his godmother to pay his father back the $1,200 and take possession of the Jaguar. Rust correction in the fenders had already been performed before it entered the Principe household. The radiator was subsequently re-cored, and the generator rebuilt. Curto got the carburetors working right. Peter recalls lying on his back in the family garage and watching his father spray black-tar undercoating beneath the Jaguar.  

“I keep it up on blocks or jackstands and when I want to take it for a ride, which is only in the spring or summer, I take it down,” Peter says. “I put the battery in it, push it outside because I never start it in the garage, start it and I’ll go for a ride in the neighborhood sometimes. Or on Sundays, where a lot of old cars get together, like for Cars and Coffee, at Great Kills Park off Hylan Boulevard. I’m the only 120. People, a lot of them, see it and say, ‘Wow, what is that?’ 

“I don’t go to sit in traffic because the car doesn’t like that,” he continued. “Maybe I’ll take it from my house to Hylan to the park, which is kind of a short drive. I do not leave Staten Island with the car. Cars go too fast today, people are too aggressive, and I worry about something happening to it. I come home and put it back up on blocks. If I drive it three or four times a year, that’s it. I’ll put five or six dollars’ worth of premium in, so it has fresh gas in it. I’d estimate it’s traveled a couple of thousand miles, total, since 1972. All I’ve had to do is just basic maintenance. 

“There has never been any accident damage, and my father never had to rebuild either the engine or transmission,” Peter declared. “The car is 70 years old and so it drips a bit of oil. The car is a Jaguar, and you know what they say about them: If it ain’t dripping oil, it’s out of oil.”  

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