Although Jaguar had come close to building a competition version of the F-Type not long after its 2012 debut, apparently working with the Williams F1 team to develop such a model, it never came to fruition. In early 2018 a genuine racer based on the car finally broke cover. But although it was built by Jaguar’s Special Vehicle Operations (SVO) based in Ryton, having been developed for an independent team, Invictus Games Racing, it wasn’t the works effort many had been hoping for.
Due to the global economic downturn of the early Nineties, Jaguar and its racing partner, TWR, had already pulled out of the World Sportscar Championship at the end of the 1991 season and then the American IMSA series the following year. But with the team contemplating a return to the Le Mans 24 Hours in 1993, three V12-powered XJR 12Ds were entered into the Daytona 24 Hours in late January as a way of gathering race experience with the cars.
Despite Ian Appleyard dominating the Alpine Rally throughout the early Fifties with his cream XK120, registration NUB120, since the Monte Carlo Rally’s rules at the time demanded cars over 1ó litres had to be four-seaters, it meant he had to ditch the sports car in favour of a MkVII instead. For his first Monte in 1952, Appleyard ordered a brand new example, registered PWN 7, but due to poor weather he, together with his co-driver wife, Pat (who was also the daughter of chairman of Sir William Lyons) finished a lowly 53rd. He would use the car again for that year’s Tulip Rally in April when he came home a strong second.
From blown diffusers to front-tyre-warming, toe-angle-adjusting steering columns, both born then banned in the past two decades, Formula One has been defined by relentless rule-bending engineering innovations since its inception. However, the most primal of them all doesn’t even hail from this century; it supersedes carbon fibre as F1’s go-to construction material in the 1980s.
Showcasing Buick’s turbo technology in the early Eighties was this one-off model, the PPG Buick Skyhawk Turbo, that was built to pace the Budweiser Cleveland 500 in 1982…
There was plenty of excitement when it was announced in March 1976 that Jaguar was to participate in the European Touring Car Championship. Not only was the powerful 5.3-litre XJ12 Coupe chosen to compete in the BMW-dominated series but it would be prepared and entered by Ralph Broad’s successful Broadspeed Engineering outfit.
With much made both then and now of Jaguar’s 1988 and 1990 victories of the Le Mans 24 Hours, its utter domination of the 1987 World Sportscar Championship has been largely forgotten. Yet it was arguably a much bigger achievement than winning a single, albeit 24-hour, race.
Alfa Romeo may be an also-ran in contemporary F1, but in 1993, the 155 V6 Ti rewrote history by winning the DTM championship in its first year of entry. With BMW and Audi withdrawing at the end of 1992, Alfa seized the opportunity to maximise the new-for-1993 FIA Class 1 touring-car rules.
A 911, clearly being driven with commitment, tackles one of the 127 corners of the Freiburg to Schauinsland hill climb. But this isn’t just any one of the many 911s that contested the Schauinsland climb until competitive events stopped after 1972. The driver is the Swabian, Eberhard Mahle, and in this 1966 photograph he’s well on the way to winning the European GT Hill Climb Championship and also the 911’s first international triumph. The irony is that if Huschke von Hanstein had prevailed, Eberhard wouldn’t have had a 911 to compete in.
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…
