01
Origins
The Jensen-Healey of 1972 was a marriage of necessity: Donald Healey needed a successor to the big Healey, Jensen needed volume, and their American distributor Kjell Qvale financed the union. The car was a conventional, pretty two-seat roadster with one radical element — the first production use of Lotus's 907 engine, a 2-litre, sixteen-valve twin-cam of genuine sophistication. Early engines leaked, smoked and failed, and warranty claims devoured the profit on every car; by the time the faults were engineered out, the reputation was set. Around 10,500 were built, plus a handful of GT estates, before Jensen's 1976 collapse took the car with it. The engine, fully sorted, went on to power Lotus's own Esprit and Elite for twenty years — the Jensen-Healey had been its unpaid test programme.
Jensen Healey-Lotus 907 · Tevend · CC BY-SA 3.0
