Ecurie Ecosse launches supercar
New LM69 is a vision of how Jaguar’s XJ13 might have evolved by the end of the ’60s
WITH THE UNIQUE Jaguar XJ13 thought to be high on Jaguar Land Rover’s list of continuation prospects, it appears to have been beaten to the punch by a small team with a resonant name – Ecurie Ecosse has revealed the details of its new, road-legal LM69.
The car derives its designation from an imaginary scenario in which members of David Murray’s racing stable visited Jaguar’s Browns Lane factory in 1967, spotted the abandoned XJ13 and discussed reviving it for a privateer assault on Le Mans in 1969. In the story, the company would revisit its successes of the previous decade when it won Le Mans twice with Jaguars, piloted by Ron Flockhart and Ninian Sanderson in 1956 and Flockhart and Ivor Bueb the following year.
Of course, the orginal Ecurie Ecosse foundered at the end of the 1960s but has been revived since and this project involves Hugh McCaig, who has been keeping the flame alive since the 1980s via his racing equipe. Crucially, the team is led by Neville Swales, who is the mastermind behind Building the Legend, an exemplary XJ13 replica said to be identical to the pre-1971 crash XJ13.
The LM69 will be a mid-engined car incorporating the 5.0-litre quad-cam V12, and just 25 examples will be handbuilt in the West Midlands, in line with 1969 homologation requirements. Delivery of customer cars, expected to cost between £800,000 and £1 million, will start in the spring of next year.
Swales said: ‘In 2014, for a very modest bid, I bought XJ13 engine number two in Germany and decided to build the car to complement it, the XJ13 not as it is now, but as it left the competitions department in 1966. We have done four more since that first car in 2016.
‘This car, which will be built by Ecurie Cars, is really a development of that. Myself and Howard Guy at Design Q started to think “What if they hadn’t mothballed the XJ13, what if it was taken on and developed by Ecurie Ecosse as it had the C-type and D-type?” And this is the result. It has an aluminium tub and composite panels and is substantially different from both the XJ13 and Building The Legend.
‘Our design and engineering team had to adhere to the regulations of the time, and feature only design details and technology that entered motorsport no later than early 1969.’
In an era when many cars are launched on the basis of fanciful figures and a rendering, the fact that a non-running LM69 has been built should reassure potential buyers. In fact, you can see it for yourselves at the Concours of Elegance at Hampton Court Palace on 6-8 September (concoursofelegance.co.uk).