Sport

Due to Jaguar’s dominant victory of the 1951 Le Mans 24 Hours race with the C-type, success the following year seemed a certainty

Porsche’s first space framed Spyder, the 550A, competed at Le Mans in coupe form to win its class, marking the only time the model raced as a hard-top. One such car has survived an interim American body to be reborn through a sparkling restoration…

The Jaguar C-Type’s arrival in 1951 might have quickly made the XK 120 obsolete as a racing car but the British Racing Drivers’ Club still chose the now four-year-old model when it was organising a Race of Champions event at the 1952 Daily Express meeting on 10 May.

The Penske PC-23 is famous for its 12 of 16 victories in the 1994 IndyCar season and equally notorious for exploiting an ambiguity that surrounded pushrod engines, which saw it utterly dominate that year’s Indy 500.

There was more than a little criticism from the press when in early 1982 Tom Walkinshaw Racing (TWR) announced it was to enter the European Touring Car Championship (ETCC) with a Jaguar XJ-S. Big, heavy and very thirsty, it was – on paper at least – an unsuitable choice for this highly competitive series, just as the XJ12 Coupe had been five years earlier. Worse still, TWR’s effort had limited backing from the factory, only getting paid when the cars finished on the podium. With BMW dominating the series, doing so would be a tall order.

If the Formula One circus wasn’t already reeling from the shock of big-haired drivers sporting pork chop sideburns and man-medallions, nothing could prepare them for the arrival of the six-wheeled Tyrrell P34 in 1976

DrivesToday recounts the story behind a famous picture from Porsche’s past…

We’re talking about the best rally cars of all time. The World Rally Championship (WRC) was never more exciting and chock-full of memorable machinery as it was during the Group B era of the 1980s; a time when the cars were considered more wild and outrageous than their F1 counterparts, coining the phrase “Formula 1 for the forest”.

Jaguar may have pulled out of The World Sportscar Championship at the end of 1991 but it had one last season in endurance racing; the 1992 International Motor Sports Association’s GT series in the US. As with the WSC, Tom Walkinshaw Racing oversaw Jaguar’s IMSA entries and used a variety of cars for the 15-race series, including the V12-engined XJR-12 for the 24-hour events, plus the V6 turbo XJR-14 and its XJR-16 replacement for the others.

Raymond Boutinaud recently restored the one and only 928 to contest the 24 Hours of Le Mans. We take a trip to his workshop and check out this legendary ‘land shark’ for ourselves

The BMW M3 grew from a sublime saloon to dominate Touring Car racing for five years. John Barker compares the road and track versions.

With no world championships or even victories to its name, Jaguar Racing’s four years in Formula 1 were a big disappointment. But it did, albeit briefly, have a three-time champion drive one of its cars

The truth is reliably stranger than fiction, and with the near-mythical motor BMW M built for Gordon Murray’s extraordinarily neat BT52 Formula 1 racer there’s almost as much strange fact and fiction as there was boost. (And there was a lot of boost.)

Since Enzo’s passing, in 1988, the prancing horse had struggled to get out of the gate. Despite top-tier Drivers — including Mansell and Prost — Maranello was a different shade of red. Having not won a driver’s title since 1979, the Ferrari 642 went embarrassingly winless in 1991 — with Prost acrimoniously sacked. Then, both Mansell and Prost would claim the 1992 and 1993 drivers titles, respectively — for rival, Williams.

As neither Mitch Evans nor Sam Bird have been able to secure the Formula E World Championship (held in mid-August at the Berlin ePrix: see news, p6), it means Teo Fabi remains Jaguar’s final champion after winning the World Sportscar Championship 30 years ago