Jaguar will be the featured brand at the Eden Classic Car and Motorcycle Show which forms part of the upcoming Knysna Oyster Festival. The show willbe staged at the Scarab outdoor market, alongside the N2 highway in Sedgefield, on Sunday 23 June. Entry fee will be R50 for adults and the proceeds of the show will be distributed among local charities.
“This year marks the 90th anniversary of the founding of Jaguar in England and to celebrate this milestone we have gathered a variety of Jaguars – 20 in all – representing many of the classic models that made this brand so famous,”commented Peter Pretorius, the chairperson of the show’s organising committee.
“This includes no fewer than 10 of the sleek E-Type models which really put this marque into the mainstream of desirable cars. It was one of the iconic cars of the 20th century and featured in many movies over the years. Enzo Ferrari reputedly said,‘Jaguar’s E-Type is the most beautiful car ever made’ when he saw it for the first time in 1961,” added Pretorius
A highlight of the Jaguar display will be Capetonian Darryl Simpson’s unique Low Drag E-type fitted with an incredibly special 6.8-litre fuel-injected quad-cam V12 Jaguar engine. This is the rarest of all Jaguars, with only two produced.
There is an enthralling tale behind Darryl’s car which was built in the United Kingdom by Neville Swales, a friend of Darryl and former brewer at SA Breweries in Newlands, Cape Town, who had returned to England to build a replica of Jaguar’s XJ13 prototype racing car. Once there he established a company, Building the Legend, to make XJ13 replicas and then branched out to make an exquisite Low Drag E-Type which was fitted with an engine based on that developed specially for the XJ13.
The donor car was a 1972 V12 E-Type coupe. The new, even sleeker bodywork is all aluminium which required a great deal of time and extreme skill to fabricate. The original design harks back to a project by Germans Peter Lindner and Peter Nocker in 1962 to further streamline an E-Type for Le Mans, but the project was aborted due to a a change in regulations for the famous race.
This means Darryl’s car, which was only completed in 2022 and will be on display in Sedgefield, is not only unique, but extremely valuable too.
The show organisers have also secured one of the famous forerunners of the E-Type in the form of Kobus van Wyk’s XK120 coupe. The XK120 was launched as a convertible in 1948 and was also the test bed for Jaguar’s new XK straight six engine.The coupe body was introduced in 1951.
At the time,the Jaguar XK120 was the fastest production car in the world, capable of a top speed of 193 km/h.It was also driven at over 100 miles per hour for 24 hours in France. The XK120 was the first Jaguar to race at Le Mans and formed the basis of the C-Type models that won Le Mans in 1951 and 1953.
The Jaguar XK120 which will be on show in Sedgefield is a rare, solid wheel model dating from 1952withspats covering the rear wheels. It is also fitted with a CType cylinder head with two-inch, sand-cast SU carburettors.
Kobus van Wyk says he will drive the car from his base at the Vaal Dam to Sedgefield to prove its reliability!
Peter Pretorius says he is getting an exceptionally good response to the call for entriesfrom collectors and has already selected more than 150 cars for the show, while there will also be several iconicclassic motorcycles on display.
