Jaguar's Back In Town

After 54 years, the Big Cat is back with a works GT racer

- Robert Ladbrook

It’s been a long time – but two key dates spring to mind. September 30, 2007. That’s the last time a Jaguar took the chequered flag in a British GT race. The second is harder to trace exactly, but it certainly happened in 1964.

That year the final Lightweight E-type rolled out of Jaguar’s Browns Lane factory. And it marked the last time a works sportscar would exit those famous Coventry workshops.

Jaguar’s motorsport story before the mid-1960s had been hugely successful, if not sporadic.

The firm dominated Le Mans with first its XK-120C, then latterly the C- and D-types, winning five times between 1951-57. But its race operations from Browns Lane ceased after that.

There was a short revival when a special run of 12 Lightweight E-types were built for racing use, and each sold to customers, rather than being run by the factory. After that final project, Jaguar’s racing arm officially shut.

Now, 54 years later, the Big Cat is back. And it’s brought a factory GT4 car to play with. In Britain.

While Jaguar has been on the fringes of a full sportscar programme for the last few decades, none of its previous efforts were ever truly ‘factory’. Its repeat Le Mans successes in 1988 and 1990 with the XJR9-LM and XJR-12 respectively involved cars designed and built by Tom Walkinshaw Racing, TWR, from its base in Oxfordshire, rather than Jaguar’s own facility. The same goes for the short-lived XJ220-C programme of the mid-1990s.

Even that disappointing XKR GT3 programme that last competed in British GT was built privately by Apex Motorsport. The newer XK GT3 project in Europe and America? That was from Emil Frey Racing.