24 Sep 07
Earlier this month, at a Northamptonshire racetrack, a little bit of history was made. If nothing more comes of it, it was an epic experience that no-one involved will forget. If, however, it is the start of something big, in the decades to come people will think of the 2007 Silverstone 24 Hours and say: 'This is where it all began.'
'It' is nothing less than the return of a factory-assisted Jaguar sports car to twice-around-the-clock racing, an arena it vacated after Le Mans in 1991. The seeds of that particular programme were sown as long ago as the mid-1970s when an American called Bob Tullius - with a little assistance from Jaguar - started racing an E-Type on the East Coast, and the link from that to Jaguar winning Le Mans outright in 1988 is direct and unbroken.
Spool forward to 2007 and the parallels are clear. The car that lined up for the third Britcar 24 Hours of Silverstone was an XKR, the closest thing to a spiritual successor to the E-Type that exists. Like the E, this XKR is highly modified and has been developed not by Jaguar directly, but with considerable backstage assistance. And, just like the E-Type, it is being run by a private team, in this case Richard Lloyd's Apex Motorsport. Among its myriad achievements, Apex was the team that took Bentley back to Le Mans in 2001 to embark upon a three-year programme resulting in outright victory in 2003.
Where the script differs is that the XKR was never meant to complete the 24-hour race. The car has had its share of teething troubles, to the extent that as it lined up for qualifying at Silverstone it had not once run for more than an hour. The plan, concocted by Lloyd and the car's owner, Stuart Scott, was simply to use the event for some much needed testing. The drivers would be Scott, his usual team-mate Chris Ryan and the championship-winning Mike Neuhoff. And then, at pretty much the last minute, a fourth was drafted into the team. Me.
