When the folks at Jaguar of Tampa decide to throw a party they sure make a statement. June 7th some 2,000 of Tampa’s elite, including a handful of Bucs players, the new mayor and an assortment of council members, were invited to help celebrate the dealership’s first anniversary, and to make full use of the opportunity they made the new Jaguar XJ the star of the evening.

And talk about a production. Wow!

You have to try to picture this - it’s just about dusk; swarms of beautiful people appropriately dressed in Saturday-night black are congregating around the store’s front garden on Fletcher Ave., where, incidentally, police have stopped traffic; a helicopter flies in, surely from some exotic place, and while it hovers over the raised fountain and garden, James Bond descends from the aircraft on a wire, into spotlights, surrounded by a horde of uniformed police and security. Then, while he has everyone’s attention 007 removes the wire from his harness and hooks it onto the giant union jack that is draped over a car. The helicopter whump-whump-whumps away into the night sky, pulling the union jack behind it, leaving a gleaming black 2004 Jaguar XJ8 in the spotlights. Awhh!!! you hadda be there!

Please don’t think I’m making light of it. I was impressed. I really was. These guys just didn’t miss a trick. The wandering minstrels, a bar carved out of ice, multiple food stations both inside and out, including a <i>chocolate fountain!<p>, liveried parking
attendants, even an Austin Powers lookalike working the crowd along with a small bevy of his semi-clothed British beauties. And don’t forget the acrobats on stilts. I know they have a name, I just can’t come up with it right now. But they were good. No, they were
GREAT! The whole evening was great. The cars were great, even though I’ve seen them before. The food was great. The crowd was great.

Seems to me this dealer has done a lot for Jaguar in the Tampa Bay area, and I hope everyone appreciates their efforts. Sometimes reading about it after the fact makes a production like this seem a bit over the top, but that’s what it takes to turn an event into a
story. The Tampa media didn’t make this one into a story, Robert Elder did, and he and his crew deserve a lot of credit.

Ray David,

Suncoast Jaguar Club