Stratstone’s Brand New Jaguar E-Type is Ready for Action!
Ask fifty car enthusiasts what is the greatest car ever made and you can be sure the Jaguar E-Type will be mentioned at least once. So it’s pretty exciting and a romantic notion that the final few E-Types originally planned in 1963 are now materialising. Originally, only 12 of the planned 18 cars were ever built – that is until now.
Jaguar finished the batch of ‘Special FT’ Lightweight E-Types in 2015, making the planned run of 18 cars finally complete – after an astonishing 52 years. Known as the Missing Six, these brand new sports cars were lovingly hand-crafted using the same manufacturing equipment and materials that the first 12 were built with.
Demand and interest is pretty much off the scale, for as anyone with a love of classic cars knows, a ‘brand new’ classic is a rare thing. I was once shown around a Beetle that had barely been driven and had sat in a pristine lock-up since purchase – it smelt new and the window winders worked like new; such things on a non-restored classic car are rare!
Ian Callum, Jaguar’s Director of Design, said of the project, “our focus has been to ensure justice was done to the original work of Sir William Lyons and Malcolm Sayer.” Modern state-of-the-art scanning aided the manufacture by mapping precisely the inner and outers of the bodyshell. The result is a perfect rendition of a classic sixties car. These are not copies and justice has certainly been done.
One of these precious automobiles, – Lightweight E-Type number 15 – is now in the hands of Stratstone, a company that have been dealing in performance and luxury cars since the 1920s. Pleasingly, Stratstone are not planning to mothball the car, but to use it for the purpose it was originally intended for, so the chances are that you may well be lucky enough to see this classic thundering around a race track at some point in the future. Trevor Finn, the company’s CEO, echoed that thought by announcing that the car will serve as a “living and dynamic ambassador for Stratstone.”
The Stratstone Jag was unveiled to a throng of curious journalists on May 9th this year at the company’s VIP Mayfair showroom in London and the Gunmetal Grey car was officially handed over by Jaguar at the event.
A month before the nerve-racking negotiations of narrow London streets that the E-Type undertook to nestle into the Mayfair showroom, the car was to be found in it’s more natural environment as it arrived at Shelsley Walsh to tackle the infamous hillclimb. The lucky driver for the day was Katarina Kyvalova, a classic car enthusiast as well as a racer of some standing, having achieved podium places in the Freddie March Memorial Trophy as well as racing her own E-Type in the Graham Hill Trophy at Goodwood this year – so the car was very much in good hands.
The 3.8 litre flat-6 XK engine powered the E-Type over the 900m Shelsley Walsh course perfectly; just as you might expect a new car to do, though it is hard to take on board that this car is exactly that – brand new. So keep your eyes peeled, as this particular iconic Missing Six E-Type is very proudly UK based and Stratstone want to show it to as many enthusiasts as they can.
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