JAGUAR'S Le Mans TRIUMPHS
Not so long ago, I took my young son for a ride in a Lamborghini. A four-liter, twin-turbocharged V8 making 650 hp. Within a couple of minutes, he was fast asleep. I laugh about it all the time, but this is part of the challenge we face at Automobili Pininfarina that everyone in our line of work faces. We have to think very seriously about how to make the next generation fall in love with cars.
The Jaguar name is synonymous with top-level motor racing where performance and durability combine for victory. But this reputation was not forged overnight. There was an arduous journey from building motorcycle sidecars in Blackpool on the blustery English west coast to being a proper sports car maker that was the pride of Coventry, Britain's Motown.
Company founder William Lyons gave cautious support to owners of his SS Jaguar sports cars in the late 1930s wanting to compete as amateurs. He well knew racing improved both the automobiles and their image. Only with the launch of the Jaguar XK120 in 1948 did he finally have a sports-racing car bursting with abundant potential in its speed and roadholding. And the XK120 with its all-new 3.4-litre straight-six twin-cam engine was indeed irresistible. Between 1949 and 1951 it clinched over 100 competition victories globally, including one in the Tourist Trophy that made a name for a talented young guy called Stirling Moss.
The acclaim from these minimally financed efforts was extraordinary. Former Jaguar executive Bob Berry, a sometime race driver himself, said: “The once insignificant company became a household word across the world… and virtually all of this was undertaken by private owners.”
The one area where the XK120 had not especially excelled was in the Le Mans 24-Hours race, the gruelling annual endurance
event where legends were made – the ultimate prize in motor racing. In 1950, two cars took 12th and 15th overall places, but excess weight and insufficient power stopped them finishing higher. So William Lyons and his deputies William Heynes and ‘Lofty' England took the bold decision to open a raceshop within the company's experimental department to build a car specifically with Le Mans supremacy the goal.
The Jaguar approach was lean and resourceful. As Berry remembered: “The engineers, draughtsmen, testers and mechanics were all drawn from our existing resource. On most occasions, work had to be fitted into the production car workload, often in the evenings and always at weekends.”
Ordinary Jaguar parts were used wherever possible, from engine components to small items like ignition leads, even lightbulbs. This cut costs and fed racing experience straight back into production cars as refinements. Consequently, in Jaguar's racing adventures ahead, engines rarely failed and cars always started any race they were entered in.
Work quickly progressed on the race-focused XK120C (for Competition), or C-type. It was built around a triangulated ‘spaceframe' chassis that incorporated the regular XK120's independent front suspension and a bespoke trailing-link set-up at the back including a novel torque reaction link to improve traction.
Former airplane aerodynamicist Malcolm Sayer applied his scientific knowledge of wind-cheating to the bodywork. Meanwhile, a standard production XK engine was tuned prudently to produce 204 bhp. A team of three cars was built for the 1951 Le Mans, and driver pairings were Stirling Moss/ Jack Fairman, Peter Walker/Peter Whitehead, and Leslie Johnson/Clemente Biondetti.
Meticulous preparation paid off spectacularly after the two Peters won the race on this, the C-type's debut. The car ran faultlessly and racked up 2243 miles – further than any Le Mans competitor ever. Meanwhile, Moss's fearless driving brought the course lap record to Jaguar too, at 105.24 mph. Jaguar was, understandably, jubilant.
In May 1952 a single C-type was entered in the Mille Miglia, the 1000-mile race around the twisty public roads of Italy, with Moss at the helm. The purpose was to evaluate—in secret—the experimental disc brakes Jaguar had co-developed with Dunlop. Discs quickly dissipated heat—unlike the universally used drums—and so gave the same, reliably predictable performance time after time. Ultimately a damaged steering rack ended Moss's day, but the brakes showed huge promise.
For Le Mans a month later, the C-type received untried, last-minute body modifications to make it more aerodynamic, and so faster. With little time for testing at realistic race speeds of 150mph, the unforeseen consequence of compromised airflow for cooling only arose once the race was underway. All three were forced to drop out through overheating.
In 1953 the factory team was back at Le Mans with three C-types reverted to their original shape but boasting disc brakes, a power boost to 220 bhp, and numerous modifications to trim unnecessary weight. Another sensational result was achieved: C-types finished first, second and fourth. The winning drivers were two larger-than-life gentleman racers, Major Tony Rolt and Duncan Hamilton, and they set a new distance record of 2539.7 miles and became the first Le Mans competitors ever to drive complete the race at an average speed of over 100 mph. Stirling Moss and Peter Walker were second, Peter Whitehead and Ian Stewart fourth. Those disc brakes were the trump card. No other cars had them then, not even Ferraris. They allowed the drivers to decelerate from 150 mph into corners far later than rivals, with complete confidence the braking capability wasn't compromised.
For 1954, William Heynes created a new ‘D-type' car with a lightweight, magnesium alloy monocoque ‘tub' for the centre section/cockpit attached to a square-section tubular frontal structure holding engine, gearbox, suspension and steering.
Streamlining guru Malcolm Sayer perfected an all-new shape based around the principle of inverting an airplane wing for downforce rather than lift, and the cockpit turned out an unusually serene, draught-free environment in which to concentrate on driving, even at 170 mph.
In tests at Le Mans in May 1954, the prototype proved so totally effective that Tony Rolt immediately shattered the circuit lap record by 5 seconds. Ferrari and Jaguar fought closely throughout the race, but constant heavy rain reduced the edge that Coventry's disc brakes gave to the British car. Then contaminated fuel began to plague the Jags, leading eventually to two of the D-types (piloted by Moss/Walker and Whitehead/ Ken Wharton) retiring. But Rolt and Hamilton overcame the problems and never relented in their pressure, bringing their D-type home second, just 1min 45 seconds behind the victorious Ferrari.
Only with this D-type did the mechanical elements depart substantially from Jaguar's regular production parts. ‘Dry-sump' lubrication maintained more consistent oil pressure, better cooling and the chance to mount the engine lower in the chassis. For 1955, engine capacity increased to 3.8 litres with power up to 275 bhp, while the bodywork was immediately identifiable from a longer nosecone and a raised tailfin bestowing a menacing, shark-like profile. This D-type could accelerate from 0-60 mph in 4.7 seconds.
Mike Hawthorn and Ivor Bueb won the race. Hawthorn fought a tremendous tussle for the whole of the first hour with Fangio's Mercedes-Benz and Castelotti's Ferrari, during which he established an astounding new lap record speed of 122 mph. However, just over two hours into the event, the Mercedes-Benz 300SLR driven by Pierre Levegh crashed into crowds of helpless spectators. Eighty people lost their lives in the worst motor racing tragedy of all time. Mercedes-Benz immediately withdrew its other cars but the race continued, and Jaguar's victory was noted but, naturally, there could be little joy in it.
The D-types were back at Le Mans in 1956, largely unaltered, although one was equipped with experimental fuel-injection to make it more efficient. Calamity struck immediately when two of the factory team cars collided on only the second lap. Hawthorn and Bueb in the fuel-injected D-type struggled until a cracked fuel line was identified and fixed and they then battled to finish an excellent sixth. However, Jaguar's wisdom at offering cars to outsiders paid off when Ninian Sanderson and Ron Flockhart of Scotland's Ecurie Ecosse won the race in a ‘privateer' car. An epic saga in every sense.
At the end of 1956, and after five years, Jaguar halted its factory racing programme. There was little more left to prove with four Le Mans wins in the bag, and the halo effect on sales of roadgoing Jaguars was immensely valuable.
The baton now passed solely to private entrants. They did not disappoint. In 1957, an Ecurie Ecosse D-type again trounced all comers to win Le Mans, driven by Flockhart and Bueb, with the same team's Sanderson/Jock Lawrence second, and an amazing three more of the invincible Jaguars in the top six.
But as one exciting era at Jaguar came to a sudden end, another soon began. The truly iconic E-type was an extraordinary metamorphosis of the D-type racer into a refined roadster that Lyons envisaged purely as a rapid and beautiful status symbol. Racing, though, remained infectious, and Formula 1 hero Graham Hill brought the E-type its first race victory in April 1961, mere weeks after the car was unveiled. Later on, Jaguar did resuscitate the D-type spirit with a tiny run of highly specialised, aluminium-bodied E-type Lightweights. These have exceptional allure with collectors today yet they didn't much dent Ferrari's supremacy among 1960s sports-racing machines. To achieve that, a specialised racer was again needed, and Jaguar created a new one in its XJ13 with a mid-mounted V12 engine. Stunning though it was in concept, gaining a competitive advantage over Porsche and Ferrari proved unfeasible for the XJ13. While Jaguar would again triumph at Le Mans in 1988 and 1990 (in successful partnership with factory outsiders, rather than using internal knowhow) the XJ13 remains the most awe-inspiring might-have-been in Jaguar's exalted ‘Le Mans history'.