Jaguar E-type Factory and Private Competition Cars

PETER GRIFFITHS, Veloce, £40, ISBN 978 1 787111 86 8

It’s inevitable that, in a book such as this, there’ll be plenty of photos of famous racing E-types. You know, the likes of CUT 7 and the Lindner-Nocker low-drag Lightweight. You’ll even see Stirling Moss (in a Ferrari) leading Roy Salvadori’s well-known E-type BUY 1 – and that’s a car that provides a clue to the bulk of this book.

You see, BUY 1 was an E-type modified by Coombs, so it ran with a glassfibre roof in place of its soft-top, wire wheels swapped for Dunlop racers, no chrome surrounds to its headlamps, and so forth. Thus it became more competitive and Jaguar took note. The works Lightweights followed. But you didn’t have to have a works car to be competitive in an E-type – and they didn’t compete only in the early 1960s, either.

Throughout the 244 pages of this mediumformat book there are photographs of pretty much every E-type that ever raced, whether as a works car or in private hands. But where it truly takes its leave from the scores of coffee-table tomes that have charted the E-type’s racing career already is as the 1960s give way to the 1970s, and we gain an insight into the world of Modsports. It was an era when an E-type could be bought for £1000 – it was simply a secondhand sports car, after all. The monocoque would be lightened, panels replaced with glassfibre, wheelarches flared to cover ever-wider wheels: not pretty, but exciting.

There’s then a lengthy appendix, detailing all the racing E-types by registration number. So it’s an excellent reference source if you want to know the history and specification of what you might see racing at Goodwood and the like. But it really comes into its own when identifying all the Modsports cars, which ran without plates.

It’s an aspect of E-type lore that hasn’t been covered in such detail elsewhere, and you’re paying for information, rather than style. Which makes this book rather good value for money.