Jensen International Automotive has spent more than two decades doing one thing: taking real, numbers-matching Jensen Interceptors from the 1960s and ’70s and rebuilding them into faster, more livable versions of themselves. Every car that left the company’s West Sussex workshop under the Interceptor R, S, or FF R badge began life as an actual Interceptor, with an actual chassis number and an actual place in Jensen’s production history. That is what made the restomod credible. It is also what makes the company’s newest creation, the Interceptor GTX, a genuinely different animal — and a more complicated one for collectors to think about.
The GTX is a clean-sheet, track-only prototype powered by a supercharged 6.8-liter V-8 built around a General Motors LT-series block, reengineered in Texas to the point that less than a fifth of the original components remain. Jensen International quotes 960 horsepower to the rear wheels through a six-speed sequential transaxle, with the engine said to be capable of considerably more. An all-aluminum chassis, hand-formed aluminum bodywork from British coachbuilder Coventry Metalcraft, and a wing capable of generating hundreds of pounds of downforce complete a car that looks, on paper, like a serious piece of engineering. None of that is the real story.
The real story is that Jensen International has quietly changed its business. A company built on restoring and upgrading real historic cars has moved into building an entirely new automobile and putting a historic name on it. Collectors have spent the last decade learning to price restomods, continuation cars, and outright recreations differently, because each carries a different relationship to authenticity. The Interceptor GTX doesn’t fit neatly into any of those categories, and how it’s ultimately received will say a great deal about what a heritage badge is actually worth once it’s separated from the metal that earned it.
A Nameplate With Real Credentials
The original Interceptor earned its reputation honestly. Introduced in 1966 and built through 1976 in roughly 6,400 examples, it paired a big American V-8 — first from Chrysler, later a 440 — with Italian design, its shape drawn by Carrozzeria Touring of Milan and eventually built in-house at Jensen’s West Bromwich factory. The glass-domed rear hatch remains one of the more distinctive silhouettes of the era. The FF variant, built in just over 300 units, was more significant still: the world’s first four-wheel-drive production road car, paired with an early anti-lock braking system adapted from aircraft technology. Engineering firsts like that are what give a nameplate real weight in the collector world, decades after the money-losing effort that produced them helped bankrupt the original company.
Jensen International Automotive built its modern business on that weight. Since the early 2000s, the firm has taken donor Interceptors and reengineered them with modern GM V-8s, upgraded brakes and suspension, and contemporary electronics, while preserving the original chassis and the car’s factory identity underneath the upgrades. It’s a formula in the same spirit as the bespoke Porsche 911 program Singer recently built in partnership with Louis Vuitton, or the kind of thoughtful American muscle restomod we covered in this rebuilt 1971 Plymouth ‘Cuda, where the value proposition rests on starting with something real and making it better, not inventing something new and calling it old.
The GTX breaks from that formula entirely. There is no donor car, no chassis link to any historic Interceptor, and no factory build sheet connecting it to Jensen’s original production run. It’s a new structure, a new body, and a new engine, styled by the independent studio Avant Design to evoke the original’s proportions without literally reproducing them. That’s a fundamentally different exercise from a true continuation program, and it’s worth contrasting with Bizzarrini’s approach to its own history, where the Aperta Lusso exists because an original design intent from the 1960s was finally completed using the era’s own methods. The GTX doesn’t complete unfinished Jensen history. It writes new history under an old name.
There is one detail that keeps the GTX from reading as a pure marketing exercise, and it deserves more attention than it’s gotten: Jeff Qvale, son of Kjell Qvale, is a named partner in bringing the car to market. Kjell Qvale was the American importer and dealer who acquired a controlling stake in Jensen Motors in 1970, steering the company through the FF and Interceptor III years before it collapsed in 1976. That is an actual corporate lineage, not a licensing arrangement dreamed up by a trademark holder with no connection to the marque. It doesn’t make the GTX a continuation car. But it does separate this revival from the long list of heritage nameplates resurrected purely for their nostalgia value.
What This Means for Collectors
For collectors, the GTX itself isn’t the car to watch. Jensen International calls it an “enhanced prototype,” it isn’t road-legal, and neither pricing nor production numbers have been announced. What matters more is what comes next: the road-going Interceptor GTR and the more luxury-oriented Interceptor GT, both previewed alongside the GTX. Those cars will determine whether Jensen International’s clean-sheet approach produces a legitimate modern grand tourer in its own right, or an expensive exercise in badge engineering. Today’s restomod and continuation market rewards documentation and traceable lineage; buyers who committed to Eagle’s Jaguar E-types or Aston Martin’s own continuation series did so because those programs published exactly how each car connects to the originals. Jensen International will need to offer the same clarity if it wants the GT and GTR judged as more than a well-executed tribute.
Collectors have grown sophisticated about paying for continuity — the same chassis, the same factory floor, the same production run — because continuity is verifiable and scarce. What nobody has settled on yet is what a name alone is worth once it has been detached from the object that made it famous. The Interceptor GTX is, whether Jensen International intended it this way or not, the collector market’s latest test case.
John Lloyd