How Just One Engine Destroyed Jensen, Britain's Greatest Muscle Car Empire

How Just One Engine Destroyed Jensen, Britain's Greatest Muscle Car Empire Jensen Motors had spent decades building a reputation as one of Britain's great performance car makers, hand crafting muscular grand tourers that combined American V8 power with British engineering pride. When the company set out to build a new sports car, the Jensen Healey, it needed an engine to match that ambition. Instead of playing it safe, Jensen made a fateful gamble, fitting the car with the Lotus 907, a brand new, largely untested engine straight out of Lotus's experimental workshop. That gamble turned into a nightmare almost immediately. The Lotus 907 was plagued with problems from the start, leaking oil constantly and blowing head gaskets with alarming regularity. Furious customers flooded Jensen with warranty claims, and the company found itself drowning in the cost of fixing an engine it never should have trusted in the first place. As if that wasn't bad enough, the 1973 oil crisis hit at the worst possible moment, gutting demand for thirsty sports cars just as Jensen needed every sale it could get. Squeezed between a bleeding balance sheet and a collapsing market, Jensen had no way out. This is the story of how one flawed engine, paired with catastrophic timing, brought down an entire British motoring legend, and how a single bad decision in an engineering meeting can be enough to destroy decades of automotive heritage.