UPRATED
If you’re not a slave to originality, the Series 3 E-Type has massive potential. We sample one man’s vision of a sharper V12 with input from some famous Jaguar names
IN THE world of performance cars, the options for someone wanting just that little bit more are endless: BMW can offer you a Competition model of most of its M cars, a Golf GTI can be ordered in Clubsport guise and of course Jaguar’s own R and R-S models of recent memory added a decisive edge to already quick cars.
No, it’s not a new phenomenon and the cash cow that is the determined petrolhead has been exploited ever since the days of the BMW 3.0CSL and Porsche 911RS. Back then though, Jaguar’s SVO-modified range-toppers were still in the distant future and when it came to the Series 3 E-Type the standard showroom model was pretty much your only choice. Although quite possibly it was felt that 5.3 litres of V12 power was quite sufficient for anyone buying a road car.
Which is why if you want the equivalent of an E-Type ‘R’ then you’ll need to build it up yourself and that’s precisely what Colin Horwath, the owner of this ’71 example, did. The roll call of people involved in its creation also gives it a nice Jaguar link: the engine work was performed by a former development engineer and the car was set up by the grandson of the firm’s former chief engineer.
The car itself left Browns Lane on June 10, 1971 as a Regency Red coupe with Cinnamon interior and factory-fitted manual four-speed, its destination being the USA – rather chillingly listed in the build sheet as ‘British Leyland New York.’ Its eventual home wasn’t the damp East Coast though, but the deep south:
Georgia to be exact, where the climate is rather kinder to mild steel sports cars and presumably its first owner enjoyed the factory-fitted air conditioning.
Two decades later the Jaguar found itself returning from the USA courtesy of Don Law, who back then was just starting out in a business which would grow to become the global centre of knowledge for all things XJ220 – and who would eventually be handed official responsibility for the cars by Jaguar itself.
Back in 1989 though, the company letterhead still mentioned ‘E-Type a speciality’ and the story goes that Don had originally imported the car for himself. When Colin expressed an interest in it though, the two came to a deal and the original correspondence remains in the car’s history file. For the agreed purchase price the car was to be MoT’d, repainted in Signal Red and generally tidied up, Don pointing out even back then that a manual V12 was a rare proposition.
It was in this form that a presumably delighted Colin ran the car for a while, the left-hand drive not presenting an obstacle. “I’d always intended using the car abroad,” he
