REVIEWED BY OCTANE STAFF AND CONTRIBUTORS
Books
PETER STEVENS, Porter Press International, £149, ISBN 978 1 913089 66 5
Yes, it’s about the XJR-15, the JaguarSport road-racer of which just 52 examples were made, but essentially this is a story about two people: the designer (and author of this book) Peter Stevens, and TWR boss Tom Walkinshaw. It’s the former’s interactions with the notoriously mercurial racer and businessman that are its most compelling feature.
Stevens is very much one of us, a total petrolhead, and the first chapter opens with a full-page 1965 image of him unashamedly posing with the 1942 Jeep that he’s just driven to Egypt; shortly afterwards there’s another full-page pic of him and his mates delving under the bonnet of the knackered 1929 MG M-type that he’d secretly bought at the age of 16.
Walkinshaw, on the other hand, while a skilled driver and team leader, was just as interested in making money, the arty Stevens less so (his parents were both painters). The two first met via saloon car racing in the mid-1970s – Stevens was a friend of Richard Lloyd, and Walkinshaw liked the graphics he’d done for Lloyd’s Camaro – and Stevens helped Walkinshaw clean out and prep the empty unit on a North Oxfordshire industrial estate that would be home to the nascent Tom Walkinshaw Racing.
Stevens tells some brilliant anecdotes about those early years: flying out to Italy to livery-up a Toleman Osella that Walkinshaw was due to drive at Le Mans, and finding that he had to buy his own spray gun, paint and some large handkerchiefs to act as face masks. ‘Without an air-pressure regulator, I had to squeeze the air line to get some kind of control of the air flow,’ he recalls. Arriving for his flight home, he was asked to sit by himself because his hair, face, arms and T-shirt were covered in blue paint!
There was a long hiatus in the 1980s while, among other things, Stevens was head of design at Lotus, before he was invited over to TWR to discuss a Le Mans racer-based road car unashamedly inspired by Jaguar’s recently announced XJ220. It became the XJR-15, and Stevens gives a detailed account of the design processes and techniques used in these largely pre-computer days – plus unique insider info. For example, what influenced him to choose Mazda 626 Coupé rear lights for the XJR-15? Stevens had a 626 himself, and Walkinshaw owned a number of Mazda dealerships so could get the lights cheaply!
It’s not all about t
