IN THIS FEATURE Successful racing heritage Definitive Jaguar racing legend Blasting up the hill Destroying the opposition Noisiest car of the festival The quickest touring car of its generation A rare privilege

You might think that the more modern such a car, the easier it would be to drive, but this is proving to be categorically not the case. The engine retains the same 5.3-litre capacity as the E-type but by now its power had risen to around 500bhp, at the expense of all the older car's delightful manners. Whereas the E pulled smoothly from idle, the XJS doesn't idle at all and coughs and splutters all the way to 4500rpm whereupon it takes off as if it had SAM missiles for exhaust pipes. Long gearing and a damp track don't help, while the unassisted and ludicrously heavy steering means you have to drive the car from the shoulders, whereas the E-type merely required your wrists.

Quickest touring car of era

The car feels monstrously fast and intimidating in a way that's entirely alien to the D and E-types. On a race track I can easily see how this translated into a form of liquid speed its older relatives would not recognise, but on a narrow, slippery hill, it's making me busier than I care to be. This is a racing car with an approach as no-nonsense and hard-nosed as the legendarily tough Tom Walkinshaw who created it. It was the only one of the three I was delighted to hand back and given the choice of another run in it or the E-type, it was to the older car that I immediately turned. The XJ was just too much of a handful in such circumstances.

It was fascinating, not to mention a rare privilege, to see first hand how the state of Jaguar's racing art evolved during the thirty years that spanned the birth of the D-type and the XJS's final victory. Despite the nearly 20 years that separate them, you can see the clear relationship between the D and the E: both seem as concerned with the provision of a magical driving experience as the production of pure speed. The XJS is something of a beast by comparison, an out and out racer where anything that does not specifically make the car faster is an irrelevance.

Within the confines of the Goodwood Hill, the older cars are incomparably better to drive than the XJS but, given a proper race track and a decent amount of wheel time, I would imagine it would be the XJS that left the most lasting memory. As it is, I would have felt lucky to have sat in any one of them - to have driven all three as fast as I safely can is a memory that'll not be taken from me.