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Had a few passenger run outs at a recent Goodwood Trackday in mates new (to him) Lightweight E-Type.

Very Nice (though he had to run it through a few 3 gear corners in top to stop the Db meeting going NUTS) - Mega car , takes some getting used to some one else being so late on the brakes at the end of that back straight - EEK!

Hi Jon.

Nice to hear you had a good day out in a very exclusive car.

Considering this is a Morgan forum, I thought it may be of interest to readers to outline the history of these special lightweight Jaguar cars.

Jaguars found their E Type model to be outclassed by the competition in the early part of the 1960s and decided to build a limited number of cars with all-aluminium body and chassis variant along with some very special competition tuning equipment including dry sumped aluminium alloy engines with wide angled cylinder heads allowing larger valves to be fitted and fed with Lucas butterfly throttle fuel injection. And more . . . . . .

At that time and despite Jaguars vast experience within International competition, even this special model remained quite uncompetitive especaially against Italian opposition and only 12 lightweight cars were ever produced.

The first was readied for the 1963 season and was built upon the existing John Coomb’s prepared car registered 4WPD which already had an excellent racing pedigree having been driven regularly by Graham Hill and Roy Salvadori during the 1961 and 1962 seasons.

Three further cars were supplied to the Briggs Cunningham and remain probably the famous of the 12 having competed at Le Mans in 1963 and being registered with consecutive numbers, 5114, 5115 and 5116 WK.

Two further cars were supplied, 4868 WK to Peter Lidner and 49 FXN to Peter Lumsden both originally built with standard looking Lightweight body shapes but were soon to be re-bodied with Malcolm Sayer’s designed low drag coupe bodies similar to that as fitted the previous year to Dick Protheroe’s steel body tub car, being the final version of his CUT 7 racers.

Further cars were supplied to Bob Jane in Australia, Tommy Atkins - 86 PJ, Peter Sutcliffe - YVH 210, Dick Wilkins – 2 GXO, Phil Scragg - PS 1175 and Kjell Qvalle in the USA ( this being the car which was found just a few years ago in a very original and “As last raced” condition somewhere in the Arizona desert).

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Very obviously these cars all have become extremely desirable and sought after by collectors world-wide and fetch premium prices when they become available on the market place.

We get to see them on occasion in the Goodwood TT and Classic Le Mans, but I suppose the days are long gone when we might see them competing at lesser events.

I am sure we would all like to know which one of these cars you were you lucky enough to have a ride in ?

Cheers, Jim.

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Ha Jim,

I think like Griffs, you can build a Lightweight to HTP Fia paper spec. Most racing are like this I think. This one was built in the early 2000's (you can imagine how much it cost to build today with all the right bit!).

It was built for historic long distance endurance rallys but I think only did a few and only been actually raced once! It has rally cams and a bit lower CR that a top spec race one, but tis could easily be changed. I here good ones can make about 340 - 350bhp. This one has about 310. Really gets in to it stride over 4.5 - 6 and a bit (could not be revv'ed out at GW in third as said dure to the boise limiters - but cracking fun). Even these recreated cars go for 100 - 250ish K!!!

We got Marcus Pye out in it for one of the later runs in the day.

Guaging thewidth of the thing first time out was interesting clouting the tyres at the chicane (just a big paint scuff, no bent panels, but felt like more - haha).



Enties in for Le Mans (make a nice weekend on the shandies!) and we were chatting to Marcus on the propose Lightweight races series in Autosport a few weeks back (can't see that having legs - but if it does, he'll be having a go )

- Nice Arse.

Weird the whole pics did not come out - likely too big.

http://www.blip.tv/file/3308576