The meal had been lavish, the wine magnificent, under the chandelier of the ancient dining room in The Welcombe Hotel, a grand old English country house just outside Stratford-Upon-Avon. It was clearly an occasion the image makers felt worthy of a new Jaguar.
My dinner companion that cold night late in February, 1979 was unknown to me when we sat down. Five hours later, after a conversation that ranged across the intricacies of suspension tuning, the winning of Le Mans on a budget that would pay beer money today and the subtleties of the red wine we were drinking, we had become friends.
Our discussion covered intimacies neither of us would want repeated. Towards the end of the meal, over Stilton and port, Bob Knight, managing director of Jaguar, revealed a few of the difficulties he faced in the struggle to maintain Jaguar’s independence within the chaotic British Leyland group.
He admitted the Series 111 XJ6 we had come to drive, 11-years after the original, had been introduced to give Jaguar time to develop a truly new model (the new XJ6, still seven years away). And, although it was not revealed at the time, Knight was involved in a desperate fight to get board approval for a new engine for that car, code-named the XJ40. There were people within Leyland who even suggested the new Jaguar should be known internally as LC40 – Leyland Cars 40.
These were the same unthinking individuals who insisted Jaguar become, Soviet-style, Large Vehicle Assembly Plant No 3 within the BL conglomerate.
Knight told me a little of the bizarre hurdles he faced in retaining Jaguar’s engineering team within the recently created Leyland Jaguar Rover Triumph (JRT) group. He passionately, yet realistically, demonstrated the need to hold on to the core of men who had made Jaguar such a strong, individual car company, for he knew that if this team were broken up, traditional Jaguar would effectively be finished. Bob’s arguments made sense and it was clear he bitterly resented the time this constant conflict took. It distracted him from managing the company, although he appreciated there was no alternative.
Knight left me in no doubt that he would do everything within his power to protect his company and its cars from those he regarded as vultures, even if this meant misleading the board and driving his small staff beyond normal endurance. His masters wanted the new Jaguar to use Rover’s Buick-based 3.5-litre alloy V8. An excellent engine, Bob admitted, for a Rover, but not a Jaguar. Even at that stage he told them the engine bay was too narrow for a V-engine, while knowing it was possible to modify to accept a wider engine (including Jaguar’s own V12). Earlier, his engineers had seriously looked at the possibility of producing eight-cylinder versions of Jag’s V12, but Knight rejected this 60-deg unit because it sounded too much like a four-cylinder engine and, even when fitted with secondary balance shafts, lacked the smoothness expected of a Jaguar.
An obstinate, single-minded – some would say narrow minded – sometimes irascible man, who inherited the position of managing director after his predecessor, Geoffrey Robinson, resigned in 1975 because he disagreed with the Ryder Plan (initiated by the British Government after the company was nationalised) to integrate the many different makes under BL. Knight was always an engineer at heart. His skills as a manager of people never really matched his huge talent as a suspension designer although, as I discovered, he was immensely likeable.
Conventional wisdom tells us Jaguar was saved by the silver-tongued John Egan (who in 1990 sold the company in Ford) but that is to deny the value of Bob Knight’s crusade to rescue the business from men who didn’t understand its unique character and wanted to subsume it into BL.
When I met Knight he had been with Jaguar for 35 years. He told me he began to make his mark in the early 1950s when Jaguar was working on its first monocoque car, the 2.4. Bob oversaw vehicle development under chief engineer Bill Heynes and it was the experience gained in designing and then painstakingly refining the systems used to achieve a quiet, smooth riding car that gave him unsurpassed knowledge on suspension development. By 1957 Knight was in charge of the engineering work on E1A, a small prototype, for which he designed an independent rear suspension. Knight told me the story: Sir William Lyons bet him £5 he couldn’t design an independent rear suspension inside a month. Working Saturdays, Knight duly presented Jaguar’s founder a complete set of layout drawings within the month. Sir William took a fiver out of his wallet and handed it over.
This work led naturally to the creation of the independent rear suspension used on the E-Type and Mk X/10. The initial version of the IRS had the wheel hubs carried by twin swinging links, while the differential was mounted directly to a steel reinforced section. In testing the arrangement transmitted noise and vibration through the rest of the car.
The decision to make the E1A into Jaguar’s next sports car dates from this time. However, it was clear that the IRS had to be sorted and NVH minimised. The solution was to isolate the IRS. Heynes and Knight set about designing a crossbeam subframe to hold the suspension, differential and the inboard rear disc brakes. The sub-frame was then fixed to the body by four rubber mountings, two on each side. This IRS setup was included in the next development car E2A and went into production on the E-type, launched at the Geneva Motor Show in March 1961 with the Mk X sedan quickly following.
By 1969, Bob was chief engineer and his masterpiece, the original XJ6, was on the road, recognised as one of the world’s great cars. Knight hated pitch in a car and this led to the establishment of soft front and stiff rear springs which became a Jaguar suspension dogma. At the same time his engineering skill meant he came to understand how to dampen out excess noise and harshness to make the XJ6 unquestionably the best riding/handling luxury car of its era.
Through the ‘70s, the turmoil within Leyland saw the destruction of the independent engineering groups that made up the company. This centralisation policy – to fold Jaguar into Rover and Triumph – made sense to the bean counters but to somebody like Knight it was a death threat. By deliberately setting out to prevent Jaguar’s absorption into the Leyland corporate system, Knight made a great many enemies who could only see the inconsistency of Jaguar qualities (in hindsight, mostly through union issues at its suppliers), and the fall in production and profits through the 1970s and used this to whip Brown’s Lane people without ever realising the extent of their contribution to the chaos. Knight saw all of this and stood his ground, determined to save Jaguar for the day when an enlightened management would restore the company’s independence.
In the end, his was the only Leyland company to retain its management team through this period, a tribute to Bob’s sometimes callous manner, but also his incredible tenacity. He was to come a victim of his own making, for in saving Jaguar from extinction, he left the company knowing that it desperately needed contemporary but still distinct management.
Michael Edwardes brought in John Egan to run Jaguar. Egan offered Knight a key job within the new company and rumour suggested the possibility of the position of chairman of the board. But in July 1980, Bob Knight decided he had had enough of the in-fighting and retired, with Jim Randle taking over engineering responsibility.
There are those who will say Knight was never managing director material. Perhaps they are the same people who in 1940 said Winston Churchill should never be Britain’s Prime Minister. Possibly, Bob was the perfect number two. Certainly, former Jaguar managing director Geoffrey Robinson seems to think so in describing him in a letter to the Coventry Evening Telegraph at the time of his departure as, “loyal and dedicated, a man of outstanding integrity and drive.”
Still, Michael Edwardes unknowing paid Knight the ultimate compliment when he wrote that some Jaguar people (he meant Knight though he was never named) were, “more concerned with producing new models and reaching new standards of engineering excellence than with managing the business.” There have been worse accolades and Bob Knight knew it.
Following his retirement Knight had little contact with the company for well over 10 years, until Nick Scheele, then Chairman of the Ford-owned Jaguar, walked over and introduced himself at a function, saying that he recognised him from the portrait on display at Jaguar. Scheele brought Knight back into the Jaguar fold, and Bob enjoyed going to several company events in the 1990s.
Retirement in 1980 did not mean Knight gave up engineering. He worked with a number of companies including Dunlop and Rolls-Royce, and during that time he developed a new front suspension concept for front-wheel drive cars. He also worked on a project for the Rover to improve the suspension on the Metro (the original Mini’s successor, never sold in Australia) and try and achieve sedan car levels of NVH from a supermini. In addition to the obvious areas of engine mounting and suspension, he also turned his attention to removing vibration from pipework, cables and ancillary fittings with extensive use being made of his own shaker rig. This project became known as the ‘Bob Knight Metro’.
Bob Knight never married, though when I meet him he admitted to secretly having two women friends and was in the throes of deciding which relationship would continue. He lived with his parents while they were alive and continued to live in the family house after they died.
Bob enjoyed travel and in 1996 spent four weeks in Australia, including seeing his cousin Lois in Melbourne. He planned to come back again in 2000, but died on August 31, 2000, aged 81.
After his death Jim Randle said Knight was the finest engineer he ever met, “I learned more from that man than any other I’ve ever known”. And of his time as head of Jaguar, Jim told me years later, “I think he singlehandedly saved the company.”
