History rolls off the Jaguar line
Nine 1950s sports cars will be hand-built to original specifications
COVENTRY, England — There’s a serious case for the Jaguar XKSS being the world’s first genuine supercar. Built from a hugely successful racer, it was the must-have performance car of the late 1950s. But the XKSS died before its time, and for 60 years it was consigned to the history books, a fond memory. Until now.
In the mid-1950s, Jaguar’s racing prowess was unbeatable. Its now-iconic D-Type won the 24 Hours of Le Mans three times in a row. When it stopped racing, 25 D-Types had been built but not sold, and Jaguar had an idea: create the ultimate road-legal sports car. The remaining D-Types were given a few styling tweaks and a windscreen, and so was born the XKSS. Customers for the new supercar included movie star Steve McQueen.
Of the planned 25, only 16 had been completed when, on February 12, 1957, disaster struck. A fire at Jaguar’s Brown’s Lane factory in the U.K. consumed the nine remaining D-Types along with all the tooling needed to convert them to road cars.
But now, the XKSS is back. Jaguar has decided to complete the set and build the final nine XKSSs from scratch, by hand and using the original chassis numbers from the original ledgers. The first car was revealed at the Los Angeles Auto Show.
The revival of the XKSS was prompted by a previous project. In 2015, Jaguar built six Lightweight E-Types, finishing the planned run of 18 that was conceived in the 1960s. The response was so positive that the case for completing more of the firm’s unfinished business was undeniable.
The project has been developed by Jaguar’s Classic division, a department set up to deal with restorations, both for customer cars and for factory-sourced machines that are offered for sale to a diversifying classic car customer base. The new XKSSs will be for an elite few, thanks to the low build number and a price well above $1 million. But they will also act as a showcase for the Classic department’s skills.
For Kev Riches, the vehicle recreation manager at Jaguar Classic, the challenge wasn’t an easy one. Do you mirror the original, or put a modern twist on it? For Riches, authenticity was the clear route.
“We could have produced it on top of an F-Type, for example, and tried to morph this body style on top of that,” he says. “But for the work and effort, who would buy it? Is it something that the markets out there actually want? Probably not. It was about trying to reproduce a car from the past.
“Is it a continuation, a replica, a recreation?” He shrugs. “That’s for people to say what they think. My view is that because we’re Jaguar, if we take something from the past and we’ve got genuine chassis numbers for them, we can continue to build the cars.”
The project is immense. Every part of the car needed to be recreated, and Riches and his team vowed to stay as close to the original XKSS as possible. Luckily, Jaguar’s archives are extensive, so many of the original plans and drawings still exist. While the building techniques are very much traditional, modern technology was used to scan existing XKSSs to determine the ideal shape. Although every car is subtly different, the research gave the five-strong core team a median set of dimensions to work toward.
The team has sought to recreate the car down to the hand-rolled magnesium alloy bodywork, the correct number and type of rivets and the welding techniques used on the chassis. The type of wood used for the steering wheel and even the grain of the leather have been mirrored, and long-defunct components, such as Smiths gauges and three Weber DC03 carburetors, have been reborn with the help of suppliers. The heart of the car, a straightsix, 3.4-litre twin-cam engine, has been recreated from scratch, thanks to classic car specialists Crosthwaite and Gardner, and Dunlop remoulded a supply of R5 tires especially for the project.
The only changes from the original spec are for safety reasons. A fourpoint harness seatbelt is included as standard, and although the disc brakes are authentic in design, the pads — produced by Mintex — have changed in compound to avoid using asbestos. The original fuel tank bag was made of rubber, which modern fuel would burn through in months, so the new car has an identical design made from contemporary materials used in Formula One. The same is true of the fuel lines.
The team has also tried to exceed the original build quality. “In essence, the car is what it used to be,” Riches says. “But what we have done is tried to work on the fit and gaps on the car. I’m sure you wouldn’t be very pleased if the door closed onto the sill, which is what happened on the original cars. So we’re trying to work to modern-day standards, which we feel is worthwhile.”
Riches can’t put a number on how much work has gone into the first XKSS, shown in L.A., but estimates are each customer car will get around 7,000 hours. When asked what the next project will be once the final XKSS is finished, in March 2018, his eyes glint.
“Wait and see,” he says. “We’ve got a lot of work to do first, but I think six months down the road we’ll start thinking about that. As we look through the archives there are many vehicles, many chassis numbers and many opportunities.”