At the age of 13, I saw my first Volvo P1800. And for two weeks, I swore up and down that somebody had slapped “VOLVO” on the back of some kind of sports car I’d never seen before as a joke. Understand that I’m circa 1983…Prior to that point, all I had seen were 240-series bricks, 400-series bricks, and 800-series bricks. Volvos were built like Legos: square, durable, and it did more damage to whatever it impacted than you would ever do back. Seeing a P1800 was akin to finding that the Mona Lisa, up close, was having a “wardrobe malfunction” in plain sight…while on display at the Louvre. It wasn’t supposed to happen, nobody expected it to happen, but…well, damn. What else do you say? The P1800 is a looker from any angle. From certain degrees you get tones of Jaguar. Others, a hint of early 1960s Ferrari. No wonder Mr. Irv Gordon drove his 1966 example the distance of seven round trips to the Moon and back.
You’re familiar with the art of restomodding, yes? This is where you take everything good and classic about the machine and you improve everything, bringing the driving experience up to modern-day par. Done right, it’s a work of art. We aren’t talking about dumping an LS into the nearest G-body and doing nothing else, either. We’re talking brakes, bodylines, structure. We’re talking electrical components, materials, workmanship. You take the time to correct errors that would’ve happened back in the day, but you do not break up the character that made the car great to begin with. For the average backyard mechanic, it’s years of work in a slavish labor of love. Now…what if an OEM tried it out?
What a nice P1800 looking car! It doesn’t hurt the provenance that Jensen built the first P1800 bodies either. Unfortunately the Jensen built cars would require more of the slavish hours to get things perfect…