“I don’t think this is what Sir William had in mind.”
The above quote is something I said to my father as I man-handled his old XK 120 down a gravel road at over 70 MPH as we hurled through a forgotten valley in the Nevada outback in June of 2000. That was over eight years ago yet somehow the theme of finding myself in the left-hand seat of one of Coventry’s finest, bumping along a rutted track keeps reoccurring in my life! In the above photo you can reconcile the lusciously sensuous curves of the bonnet of an XK SS Jaguar as it bumps along some forgotten backroad of Montana. It was the 2007 Going To The Sun Rally when Philippe Reyns offered me a ride in his factory-modified for street-legality D-type race car, and the route instructions sent us the wrong way. It ended up being something like a 6 mile detour along a gravel road… not exactly what they had in mind when the D-type was purpose-built for winning Le Mans.
Here is another shot on the same road, with a one-lane bridge:
I was going to say that it’s what Sir Alec Issigonis had in mind until I remembered he didn’t like racing either. In any case this looks like a route more suitable for a Cooper S than an XK of any flavour. See here (can you tell I’ve just put my entry in for the 2008 Monte Carlo Historique?):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=An-nVqrx5V0&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtyZcFIDYC4&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbdaXUh9rbc&feature=related
Chuck, any chance you want to upload any of those to Coventry Racers? According to records, that is chassis number XKSS 754. (Here’s a handy direct upload link).
That would be a $2 – $3 million automobile these days. o_O
Here is the Mulsanne straight form the cockpit of a D type:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DulNn2tlTFs&eurl=http://autopendium.com/featureds/13