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| Tullius E-Type 1975 champion |
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The E-type spent its entire career, from its birth in 1961 to when production ceased in 1974, without ever making it as a front line racer. Many tried but there was always something, usually a Porsche or Ferrari, that blocked the E-type's route to the top step. How can it be, therefore, that the E-type you see here, which you'll be forgiven for not recognising at all, simply destroyed the opposition and will be remembered as one of the most significant racing Jaguars of all?
The key to this apparently insoluble conundrum is discovering that all its successes took place a long way from here, on the other side of the Atlantic, and that, somewhat staggeringly, they did not start until after the E-type was out of production. Its significance is simple: the Jaguar factory team retired from racing in 1956 and it was the achievements of this E-type and its successors that rekindled the flame and got Jaguar thinking about racing again. The line from this E-type to the XJR-9LM that won the 1988 Le Mans runs straight and true.
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| Wild E-Type a pussycat to drive |
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It was Jaguar North America's then boss, Mike Dale, who decided to enter the E-type into the Sports Car Club of America's production car championship. The programme was entrusted to the well known MG and Triumph racer Bob Tullius and his Group 44 team. He built just one car - this car - and it was ready only for the last six rounds of the 1974 championship and Tullius won five of them. The next year he took seven wins and the championship too, destroying opposition from Porsche and, particularly Chevrolet's Corvettes, which had won the title 14 times in the previous 17 years. Buoyed by such success, Tullius swapped the now obsolete E-type for an XJS and then built a sports prototype which, in 1985, took Jaguar back to Le Mans, finally precipitating the return of the factory team in 1986.
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