Jaguar Mark VIII

The Jaguar Mark VIII is a large four-door sports sedan introduced by the Jaguar company of Coventry at the 1956 London Motor Show.

The body

The car shared its 10-foot (3.05 m) wheelbase with its predecessor, the Jaguar Mark VII, which outwardly it closely resembled. However, the interior fittings were more luxurious than those of the Mark VII. Distinguishing visually between the models is facilitated by changes to the front grille, the driving or fog lamps being moved from the front panel to the horizontal panel between bumper & front panel, larger rear lamps and most obviously a curved chrome trim strip below the waistline which allowed the factory to offer a variety of two-tone paint schemes. In addition the new car had rear spats that were cut back to display more of the rear wheels and featured a one-piece slightly curved windscreen, where the Mark VII had incorporated a two-piece front screen of flat glass.

Engine and running gear

The Mark VIII inherited from its predecessor the 3442 cc straight-six engine which it shared with the Jaguar XK140 that appeared two years earlier. In the Mark VIII, a modified cylinder head known as the 'B' type was used. Although introduced subsequent to the 'C' type competition head (as used on the C-Type racer and available as an option on the XK 140) this naming made more sense than might at first appear. The 'B' type head used the larger valves of the 'C' type head, with the smaller intake port diameter of original XK cylinder head that had been introduced on the MK VII, which was now referred to as the 'A' type. The combination of larger valves with the original intake port diameters allowed faster gas flow at low and medium speeds to promote better fuel-air mixing. As the MK VIII was not likely to be revved as high as the C-Type racers and the XK 140's equipped with the 'C' type head the reduction in flow at high rpm's was not seen to be a disadvantage.

Mark VIII

Mark VIII or Mark 8 often refers to the eighth version of a product, frequently military hardware. "Mark", meaning "model" or "variant", can be abbreviated "Mk."

Mark VIII or Mark 8 can specifically refer to:

In technology

In military and weaponry

Mark 8 torpedo (1911); American 21-inch torpedo designed by Bliss-Leavitt.

18 inch Mark VIII torpedo; a British 18-inch wet-heater torpedo that began service in 1913

Tank Mark VIII, also known as the "Liberty" or "International tank"; an Anglo-American tank design of the late World War I

BL 8 inch Howitzer Mk 8 (1916); British 8-inch artillery piece used in WWI and early WWII

21-inch Mark VIII torpedo; a common British 21-inch torpedo that began service in 1927, saw extensive use in WWII and was used as late as 1982 to sink the ARA General Belgrano

QF 2-pounder Mark VIII (1930–1940s), also known as the "pom-pom"; a quick-firing British naval anti-aircraft gun

Japanese naval aerial bomb color code Mark 8; a green-brown-grey color code denoting an anti-shipping skip bomb

Tank Mark VIII

The Tank Mark VIII also known as the Liberty or The International was an Anglo-American tank design of the First World War intended to overcome the limitations of the earlier British designs and be a collaborative effort to equip France, the UK and the US with a single heavy tank design.

Production at a site in France was expected to take advantage of US industrial capacity to produce the automotive elements with the UK producing the armoured hulls and armament. The planned production levels would have equipped the Allied armies with a very large tank force that would have broken through the German defensive positions in the planned offensive for 1919. In practice manufacture was slow and only a few vehicles were produced before the end of the war in November 1918.

After the war, 100 vehicles assembled in the US were used by the US Army until more advanced designs replaced them in 1932. A few tanks that had not been scrapped by the start of World War II were provided to Canada for training purposes.