NEW BUILDS: “The Terror of London” Comes To Drag City!

It was only a few posts ago that I made that case that it was necessary for me to start adding some more Jaguar E-Types to my numbered racing fleet due to my recent corresponding increase in the number of Corvette Stingrays, and there I explained why I want parity between the two marquees. Well, I don’t quite have parity yet, but you are looking here at what will almost surely be the last Aurora Jaguar I will be adding to this fleet. Now, yeah, I know I say stuff like that a lot, but in this case I can be pretty confident; of the 10 colors this body was made in throughout its production run, 6 of them are common and easily obtainable, while the other 4 are much harder to find and quite expensive. And because adding one of these cars to the racing fleet requires making wheel well modifications to the body in order to accommodate my RRR or Vincent racing wheels, I can pretty much promise that if I ever obtain this body in one of the 4 rare colors (in order of scarcity/value: dark blue, black, gray, slate blue), it will be getting added to The Road Crew and left original, and not modified for use at Drag City.

But…then again…I may someday come across one of those rare colors in a condition like the one I’m showing here, for this was truly a serendipitous find! The turquoise Jaguar is definitely not rare-I see it for sale all the time-but finding one that was rough enough that I could modify it without compunction while still being good enough to be worth having has taken literally years. I finally found just such a car from a seller in NY, where a previous owner had already done the work for me! In spite of the smooth, high quality job performed, the wheel well modifications on this car were not done by your humble blogger; I actually bought it like this! Said previous owner, who must have been armed with a Dremel or similar tool of their own, appears to have had a need to make the same mods to this body that I always do, and they did it so well that all this car needed when it arrived was a good cleaning and decoration, and it was ready to mount on an Auto World Ultra G chassis with RRR wheels and full size tires! How’s that for getting lucky??

I’ve had this car built “in my mind” for well over 2 years; although they are now no longer available, I have bought countless sets of the wire wheels from Road Race Replicas over the years, in chrome and painted in black and gold. I’ve had a gold set in waiting for this car for all this time, and when I found the perfect body, I bid on it to win…which wasn’t difficult, since it isn’t all that valuable, and in addition to the perfect body I got a great running original Aurora closed rivet chassis along with it, which, of course, has already been donated to The Road Crew.

The gold wheels look absolutely killer on the turquoise body! I was originally planning to stripe it in black, but at the last minute I thought a set of white stripes with black outlines might look good too, and since I already have a turquoise and black setup (my #13 Ford GT 40), I thought I’d try the white stripes with the black roundels. I then finished it off with the 2nd to last set of headlamp decals I had for these cars which, of course, were also produced by Road Race Replicas, meaning that-again-there won’t be any more.

I’ve mentioned in previous posts that one needs to be careful with these smaller, lighter, short-wheelbase Aurora bodies, because mounting them on the fastest of chassis produces a car that is so fast that it is essentially uncontrollable. Wary of that, I mounted this on an older and quite high mileage chassis. I was initially unhappy with the performance, so I went back to the workbench and upgraded it with one of my few remaining sets of OS3 Black Dragon field magnets. I’ve never seen an Auto World chassis respond so dramatically to a magnet swap; when I took it back to the track for a second test, it was like a different car! Fast, grippy, controllable: this is going to be a fierce competitor, just like the real thing! And as if all that weren’t enough, I even graced her with the awesome racing number 69, another one I haven’t yet used because I’ve been saving it for years for a special car!

Now, a car that looks this good needs some good Lore, and I’ve had quite the story set up for this one! This race-ready Jag is an early 1962 edition with the 3.8 Litre engine, which has been treated to the full race setup including a ported head, improved cooling, and the obligatory tri-Weber side-draft conversion along with the essential upgrade to a ZF 5-speed box to replace the original clunky Moss 4-speed. She comes to Drag City bearing the name “SPRING-HEELED JACK,” a moniker culled from 19^th century British folklore about a devilish scoundrel that allegedly terrorized several English and Scotish towns in the early Victorian era. Raced by California-born Gavin “Gladiator” Gorman, a Jaguar fanatic from childhood due to his family’s English roots, this early Series I beauty may be equipped with the smaller displacement engine, but it has all the right stuff to challenge any other sports car on the track! Dead Man’s Curve redux, anyone? BRING IT ON!!!