JAGUAR MK1

AN EARLY BENCHMARK

Anderson was let loose at Brands

The British Touring Car Championship is without doubt UK motorsport’s biggest and most popular championship, regularly thrilling crowds and TV audiences with that particular brand of carefully crafted panel-bashing competition.

From the genteel early days of the British Saloon Car Championship in the late-1950s, to the frenetic manufacturer-backed height of the Super Touring era, to the modern day’s NGTC ‘silhouette’ style, the BTCC has remained a pivotal mainstay of the British racing scene.

To celebrate the category’s 60th birthday, we gathered some of the most iconic cars ever to grace the track in its name – and set Ben Anderson loose in them…

Big cat growls

Jaguar’s gargantuan Mk7 was the early saloon car pacesetter in the UK, but by the time the British Saloon Car Championship arrived it had given way to the Mk1 – a designation retrospectively applied once the Mk2 arrived in 1959. Both models, which virtually invented the performance saloon with the 3.4-litre and 3.8-litre XK engines that won Le Mans in C-types and D-types, were tin-top benchmarks. They racked up 42 race victories, but never scored a drivers’ title thanks to the class structure. The 3.8 Mk2 won every round in 1961 and ’62 before being outgunned by the arrival of American V8 muscle in ’63.