Modified IS300h - Thoughts?

[parkman]

I absolutely agree with you, Odysseus. I just wondered whether the Sport grill does actually fit.

Having said that, there are instances when a change from standard to a piece of, perhaps bodywork, does a lot for a standard car. If you look at the 2005 to 2009 series of XJ jaguars the grill is quite dull, but without making any changes you can fit the mesh grill from the XJR. The car just looks better, but nobody is going to confuse it with an XJR as the wheels and some other bits are different on the XJR.

Mercedes are the same. For instance, the grill on the 2006 E-class is a bit boring looking, but you can just unscrew it and fit the 3 bar grill that AMG use. Again, it looks much better but you are not going to confuse an E220 for for an AMG E630 !!

Lastly, I have really nice 5 spoke alloys on my 300h Premier, and I think that they are much nicer than the alloys fitted on the rest of the IS 200 range, but if I was to swap my alloys with those from an IS Sport I can't imagine anyone mistaking my car for a Sport, or mistaking a Sport for my Premier.

All that being said, I see absolutely no point in fitting all the bodywork features from a Sport onto an Executive as it would soon be plainly obvious that the car isn't a Sport. I prefer the opposite approach, and have always used it, of not having too much at all to show that the car is modified. I had a 340 bhp Lotus Sunbeam years ago that was stripped of everything, chrome, badges etc, so that it looked a lot like a standard Sunbeam 1600. But it was fitted with a full works, group B rally engine and running gear and would eat just about anything except supercars. But it looked like a boring tin can !!!

Parkman.

[ghost_killer]

My opinion is, the F sport probably won't fit the non f-sport bumper....what seems to look same shape can sometimes be different, however as one mentioned the Sport model, Sport and F-sport are different, the Sport grille would probably fit as the Sport has the same bumper as the non F-sport models. Far as I am aware the Sport just has different colour theme and no chrome ?

[parkman]

I would image that you are probably right. I quite like the F-Sport grill, but would I be interested in actually changing my own Premier style grill ? I don't think so, at this time of my life. It looks like a very expensive piece of bodywork. At least, if you had a standard Jaguar XJ you can buy the mesh grill from an XJR for about £250, I think. I'm not sure as I already had an XJR, in fact I had two of them !!

What a ponsy show-off, I know, but I had a desire for them at the time !!

Parkman.