We welcome a new face to [Our Jaguars], and a new fleet... of racing Jaguars.
With seven race weekends coming up over the coming season, we are setting our sights on achieving our first race win after taking a number of 2nd and 3rd place podium finishes in 2023 using our built-fromscratch S-TYPER.
The Jaguar Championship comprises a mix of Jaguar cars dating from the 1970s to the new millennium. The XJS is the most populous car on the grid due to its heritage and success as a race car platform, in both 6 cylinder and V12 guise. The grid also has an eccentric mix of XK8s and XKRs, XJ saloons of all model years from Series I through XJ40, X300 and even our own X350 2.7 diesel. Two 20-minute races per weekend guarantee exciting action for the fans and enthusiasts who come to see the spectacle of these big and rather heavy race cars being thrown about like go-karts. Action is guaranteed, and the first corner after lights-out at the race start is breathtaking as swarms of Jaguars fight it out for position under a din of growling six, eight and 12-cylinder engines and shrieking superchargers of the Class-A cars!
Our own story of 2024 begins with our goal of achieving 100% reliability. We achieved this feat in our first year of racing in the 2022 season, when our diesel XJ won the Class B title, and third place overall in the championship. This was as a result of more than 2000km of pre-season testing between November 2021 and March 2022 at our local Donington Park circuit. Engines, gearboxes and other components were tested to destruction, and in fact we broke three engines and nine turbos in that short space of time! Lessons were learned, and we finished every single race of the 2022 Jaguar Championship rarely better placed than 3rd or 4th in class, but enough points to outscore faster cars and drivers that just didn’t have the perfect reliability.
We didn’t get the testing time for the S-TYPE R, and just scraped one test day at Castle Combe – two days before the car was due to debut at Silverstone GP circuit for Round One of the Jaguar Championship. The car simply wasn’t ready, and at Combe we barely managed 5 laps in a row without something else going wrong. The testing concluded when an oil cooler pipe joint failed at high speed, spraying the left front tyre with hot engine oil and causing us to spin violently. Fortunately, the spin took us towards the infield of the circuit with acres of run-off space and not towards the un
