Doug Nye: The best E-type I've ever driven

An interesting aspect of FOS is the effect it has upon a new participant, invited to run a car or motorcycle for the first time.  Michael Ballard is a Jaguar specialist based in Fleet, Hampshire. He has maintained, prepared and serviced the ex-Equipe Endeavour Jaguar E-type roadster – ‘ECD 400’ – for some time past, and the owner invited him to share the drive with me this year.

Despite its relatively modest, early 1961 ‘Flat-floor’ E-type roadster looks, ‘ECD’ is a very historic vehicle. Tommy Sopwith’s Equipe Endeavour organisation entered it for the Spring Trophy meeting at Oulton Park on Saturday, April 16^th, that year.  It was the much-anticipated racing debut of the brand-new, just-released Jaguar sports car, and two of the E-types would be confronting Ferrari and Aston Martin – the established front-runners in GT competition at the time.

The race was over 25 laps – 69 miles – and Graham Hill would be driving ‘ECD’ for Sopwith while Roy Salvadori would be in the grey-liveried sister car ‘4 WPD’ entered by Guildford, Surrey, Jaguar distributor John Coombs.  Motor Sport’s report of the event was brief and to the point, reading simply: “Graham Hill and Roy Salvadori sent the new E-Type Jaguars off to a good racing start by taking the first and third places in the Oulton Park Trophy for GT cars on April 16th. Practice times for both cars (which had, incidentally, come virtually straight from Coventry) indicated that only Innes Ireland in a DB4 GT Aston Martin had any chance of holding them. The Ferraris of Graham Whitehead and Jack Sears were both outpaced in the race as well as during the practice periods…”  There you go – job done.

Autosport’s report was rather more detailed, appearing five days after the event and headlined: “These Jaguars Are Really Something!”.  The report read: “The long-awaited competition debut of the new ‘E’-type Jaguar has been made at last.  Two of the magnificent new Coventry machines appeared in the main race of the day at the BARC National meeting at Oulton Park, Cheshire, last Saturday.  Their first appearance was an impressive one, both cars being in virtually standard trim and leading the race in procession until two laps from the end, when Innes Ireland squeezed past Roy Salvadori to take second place in John Ogier’s DB4GT Aston Martin.

“Graham Hill, who won the race in the Equipe Endeavour car, drove brilliantly, and expressed himself as being extremely happy with the new car. He took the lead from Roy Salvadori, in John Coombs’s E-type, on the 13^th lap, to win by something like 150 yards. The Ferraris of Jack Sears and Graham Whitehead took fourth and fifth places – positions they held throughout the race…”.

Roy had used-up the brakes in the Coombs car, hence his pace falling off later in the race – and Graham had simply made a better job of nursing ‘ECD’ at race-leading pace.  Of course questions have been asked ever after about “Was it a fix?”.  Jaguar were not unknown for using friends and influence to promote their Coventry brand, and both entrants Sopwith and Coombs had or would develop very close associations with Col Ronnie Hoare of the new Maranello Concessionaires Ferrari business – while also being long-time Jaguar exponents - and were well aware that a national race at Oulton Park would hardly register upon Mr Ferrari’s antennae in Maranello.  Big news in Great Britsain would not necessarily disturb the excitable giornalisti of ‘La Corriere della Serra’ or even the motor sports specialists of ‘Auto Italiana’.

Here, however, they might have been wrong becausefollowing the new E-type’s public launch at the year’s Geneva Salon that March, Mr Ferrari had evidently marched his engineers into a meeting at Maranello – and had confronted them with photographs highlighting the new Jaguar’s gorgeous shape.

He compared its dazzling seductive feminine lines  to the bluff-bowed sobriety of the contemporary Ferrari 250 GT Short-Wheelbase Berlinetta, and was most disparaging about his own company’s prime product of the time…

As his engineers squirmed uncomfortably in their office seats, what really set fire to The Old Man’s shirt trails was the price of the British 3.8-litre 6-cylinder car – around £1,900 only in the UK – where a 250 GT SWB with its V12 engine of only 3-litres capacity was struggling to find buyers at £5,000 and more…

La Ferrari had been the top high-performance GT car couturier in the global business producing, along with stylist Pininfarina and panel-bashers Scaglietti, many of the world’s most exotic and beautiful cars. And here they were being upstaged by those darned English Midlanders from the company who had also no fewer than five times denied Ferrari victory in the race he most valued – the Le Mans 24 Hours. This new E-type really was rubbing it in…

There is no mere coincidence that for 1962 the replacement Ferrari Gran Turismo should offer lines as penetrative and sleekly beautiful as the E-Type – and that new model emerged as the Ferrari 250 GTO…

However, in the build-up to this 25^th Festival of Speed our friend and Jaguar carer Michael Ballard was like a dog with two tails at the prospect of running and driving old ‘ECD’.  But first, of course, he (and I) had to comply with the new insurance requirements that were getting hot and heavy – literally as it turned out – about racewear for participating drivers, regardless of whether one was hurling a car up the hill with your hair on fire, running against the clock for a competitive time, or just grandma-ing a lovely original car like ‘ECD’ up the hill in a gentle showing-off-the-car demonstration.

This involved us having to invest in new crash helmet, new overalls, new fire resistant undies, dear little fire-resistant fairy boots – all the regulation-required boredom of modern motor sport. Being forced to abandon the old two-piece pale-blue overalls I’ve used for the previous 24 Festivals didn’t make me at all happy – but I have no doubt it brought relief to the scrutineers, who in recent years must have thought “Oh well, it’s only Doug – he’s too slow to set fire to himself (we hope)”.

Thus far that had proved to be true.  But in 2018 I was denied the chance to prove it again… and the scrutineers no longer felt constrained to cross their fingers and trust that I wouldn’t do something silly at Molecomb, or The Flint Wall, or passing Carnes Seat – or flat-out across the finish line.

Anyway, Michael with his fiancée Linda and fellow engineers Jim Hills and Steve Hawke apparently enjoyed a lovely weekend with the cherished first race-winning E-Type under Goodwood’s blazing sun.  Old ‘ECD’ has a lovely engine – one of the smoothest and most torquey E-Types I have ever had the pleasure of driving – and one could just imagine the frisson of competitive success – of “job done” – that the great Graham Hill felt in that cockpit back on April 16, 1961. First race outing – first win – first defeat (of a rare few) by Jaguar over Ferrari. Historic stuff, you see – that’s what the Festival has been all about for 25 long years… And forgive us if we are so very proud of it…

Photography courtesy of The GP Library.