WHEN IT COMES TO CARS, RACING DEFINED THE 20TH CENTURY.

The sport laid out the state of the art, pushed us and the machine beyond what we thought possible.

To celebrate this magazine’s 70th anniversary, we chose three pivotal decades in both R&T history and motorsport — the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. We selected three manufacturers that made their bones racing in those eras, companies whose balance sheets are now largely dependent on a vehicle unlike any pure-bred track car: the heavy, thirsty SUV.

We chose a vintage race car from each manufacturer, plus three SUVs in modern templates: big bruiser (BMW X5 M), mid-size luxury (Jaguar F-Pace S), and pocket performance (Porsche Macan GTS). Finally, we took the whole lineup to the track: Spring Mountain Motorsports Ranch in Pahrump, Nevada.

The vintage cars were a reminder of how this business works. How it operates on an odd mix of fashion and science; how racing was once the most effective way to market a new car but is now almost an afterthought; how the industry evolves based on what customers believe to matter. The point wasn’t so much a hardware comparison as a look at ideology — how our definition of speed, and what a fast car should ask of us, has changed.

Richard Pardon

JAGUAR | 1954 D-Type & 2017 F-Pace S

There are a hundred things worth knowing about the Jaguar D-type, but the most evocative piece of trivia has nothing to do with sheet metal and everything to do with people. In 1953, Jaguar notched its second win at the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Shortly after, the factory sent a telegram to Queen Elizabeth II:

“The Jaguar team humbly present their loyal duty to Her Majesty and wish to advise her that in her Coronation year they have won for Britain the world’s greatest international car race at Le Mans, France, yesterday. Signed, Jaguar, Coventry.”

A telegram to the queen! Because this was 1950s Britain, and motor racing was then front-page news. Also because Jaguar folk were generally mannered individuals. They wore white coveralls and ties at racetracks, and they built cars specifically for a 24-hour race in France, where men tore around at triple digits, no seat belts, on closed public roads. For a time, their company was viewed in the same light as Ferrari: a maker of exotic and staggeringly beautiful sports cars, among the best in the world.

Richard Pardon

That 1953 win came with a car called the C-type. It was a worked-over version of Jaguar’s XK120 sports car, lighter and faster, with a low-drag aluminum body (the “C” represented XK120C, for Competition). Jaguar first went to Le Mans in 1950, with a 120, finishing 12th overall. The next year, a C-Type won overall.The world noticed. The company had built its first sports car less than 20 years before.

The D-type followed. From 1954 to 1956, 87 examples were produced. The car looked like a happy, cat-faced UFO; it won Le Mans in 1955, 1956, and 1957; with the right gearing, it would crank to 190 mph at a time when most British sedans were lucky to hit 70. The D used guts like those of the C — a twin-cam straight-six, independent front suspension, a four-speed gearbox, a live rear axle — but also an ingenious riveted-aluminum unibody. The car ended up more than 200 pounds lighter than the C-type. Years later, when Jaguar designed the legendary E-Type, the company's engineers used a similar style of construction. The arrangement was still seen as revolutionary. (Not for nothing did World War II leave a bunch of former aircraft engineers kicking around England. They gave the country’s racing industry a leg up that it retains to this day.)

Richard Pardon

From 1952 to 1985, Jaguar’s chief test driver was a man named Norman Dewis. I know a D-type will do 190 mph because he told me once, in an interview. Dewis said he went that fast at Le Mans, in 1955, in the middle of the night.

“It was fine,” he said, shrugging. “The car liked it.”

My mouth gaped. Which is also what happened when our test D-type, a 1954, rolled out of its transporter in Pahrump.

A D-type’s nose opens as one piece. The engine it covers is a masterpiece, an aluminum-head stunner with three giant Weber carburetors. The 3.8-liter in our test car began life in Jaguar’s experimental department; it was dynoed at 297 hp in period, nearly 50 hp more than a production D-type. The same basic design was used in the E-type and every XJ6 until 1987.

It lit off with a throaty, crackling snarl. When I climbed in, the owner told me to shift at 5000 rpm. “But it doesn’t really matter,” he said, because “you don’t always need to rev it.”

Richard Pardon

Good race cars always feel a little like small airplanes, but I’ve never met one that so obviously referenced a runway. The Jag’s flanks are glassy save a smattering of rivets. The body tucks around the tires like the wheel pants on a Thirties Lockheed. The engine pumps out torque the same way fire hydrants spew water. And like an experimental airplane, the car is a mesmerizing blend of old function and new art. The chronometric tach and speedometer, each larger than your palm, have clockwork-driven needles that stutter-step across the dial. Or consider the car's power-assisted disc brakes. They were an evolution of the brakes on the C-type, which was the first race car to use disc brakes in any fashion. The system was designed to consume just one set of brake pads over 24 hours, with pedal assist from a gearbox-driven pump that pressurized brake fluid. (The system needs a huge volume of fluid for proper operation; when you count the reservoir, the D carries more than a gallon of the stuff.)

The brakes are incredible, and an apt metaphor for the whole car — the Jag slows almost like a modern vehicle. But it also reeks of early days: The design and huge assist mean that you can lock all four wheels at 80 mph by simply laying your foot on the pedal. The difference between a full-race stop and no brake at all is little more than heavy breathing. The effect was disarming on the first lap and wonderfully relaxing by the third, when I learned to bathe in the oddity. Same for the absurdly long throttle (flat-out meant overextending my ankle, but also wheelspin you could dab away with a toe flex). Or the one-man plastic windshield (wind tamed, intake honk funneled up your nose).

Richard Pardon

Combine all that with ferocious stability at speed and a gearbox slower than a day calendar, and you end up with shifts that feel like achievements, as if you’ve moved on to a new chapter in your life. (“Third gear? That was yesterday. Today I am a man, in fourth.”) Nor do you drive the car with force. It wants aggressive, creamy finesse and straight arms. You ramp your inputs gently, so the chassis and skinny tires don’t fight back or keep the engine from putting its grunt to the ground. And when the car slides, the rear wheels break first. Accompanied, the whole time, by that thunder-blat six, just elegant violence.

This is the drug that helped sell the world on one of the greatest marques in history. It’s also why people put up with decades of unreliable Jaguar road cars with the resale value of an old sandwich: I would own a million broken old heaps just to get a hint of a D-type’s romance. The whiff of blitzing around France in the 1950s, listening to that Picasso of an engine snarl itself silly. Knowing that racing is dangerous, but not caring, because you are moments past a world war in which death ate most of Europe.

Richard Pardon

We are now 60 years from Jaguar’s last production-based Le Mans win, which means public knowledge of that accomplishment can’t be taken for granted. The F-Pace we brought to this test had a few qualities in common with the D — a propensity for sliding all four tires, surprisingly soft springs, good compliance, linear and quiet steering. Around Spring Mountain’s technical, 2.2-mile Villeneuve A track layout, the SUV was slightly quicker than its ancestor. There is a family resemblance between the two cars, if you squint. Even so, driving the SUV after the D seemed an unfair tangent, a lyric poem with the nouns missing.

Perhaps because the world is now different, and less hospitable to poetry. Jaguar is currently owned by Tata Motors, a company from India, a former English colony. Aside from backing a Formula E team, Jaguar no longer competes in motorsport and is mostly focused on staying relevant and profitable after decades of mismanagement. In the modern climate, that means building a crossover, no matter how that choice lines up with history.

Richard Pardon

Which, it helps to remember, doesn’t always make sense. When the last D-type was built, the model was nearly obsolete. At the end of production, 25 examples remained unsold. In retrospect, the idea of something so magical becoming old hat is a little hard to take.

Thankfully, certain people understood. In 1956, Jaguar’s founder, William Lyons, was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. Sixty-one years later, that title still seems appropriate. And, when you stare into the fenders of a D-type, nowhere near enough.

Richard Pardon

PORSCHE | 1967 911 S & 2017 MACAN GTS

In 1963, Porsche introduced a new rear-engine sports car. Four years after that, it released an angrier version of the same car. In 1967, the production 911 S weighed 2365 pounds and made 180 hp from a 2.0-liter, 6800-rpm, carbureted, air-cooled flat-six. But numbers rarely tell the whole story, so I found myself strapping into a Polo Red '67 S and thinking about everything that makes a 911 special: the underdog family company that became the world’s most successful racing dynasty. The gazillion wins, the live-wire steering, the crazy traction. The engine’s baroowww gruff-howl, which sticks in your head for weeks. Or even just those friendly front fenders, jutting out like a couple of bowsprits, perpetually visible from the car's front seats.

The 911 S we sourced for this test has been a race car since new. In February of 1967, its first owner, Jack Ryan, used it to win the 2.0-liter-and-under GT class at the 24 Hours of Daytona. Ryan and his co-driver finished ninth overall, behind three Ferraris, two Porsche prototypes, and three Ford GT40s. (If you want to lose your mind, dig up the entry list. F1 legends from Mario Andretti to Bruce McLaren, plus Car and Driver editor Brock Yates.) Tellingly, 38 of the 60 starters did not take the checker. Racing in the Sixties, as now, was a mix of luck and hard work, but the cars were exponentially more fragile.

Richard Pardon

And chiefly, the sport was simpler. In period images, Ryan’s car looks almost stock. At Daytona, it ran steel wheels and fender gaps that could swallow a baseball. The car represents a time when privateers could show up at a major international road race and gun for the front in lightly modified production cars, most of which were not laid out with competition in mind. As racing evolved, the science of motorsport began to displace the art. From tires that exchanged slip-angle tolerance for grip, to suspensions that better controlled toe and camber, everything grew more focused and less compromised. The upside was drivers who stopped dying in large numbers, and racing that became astonishingly close. The downside is the general absence of dramatic flaws — in 2017, you rarely see new race cars entering 100-mph corners ass-first because their suspensions and tires all but demand it. When a new 911 RSR is visibly sliding around Daytona, something has gone wrong. When a ’67 S moves in a corner, it’s because the guy in the cockpit has a pulse.

Richard Pardon

Strapping into our test car, I fell to pieces. Nothing moves like a 1960s 911, and nothing sounds like a 2.0-liter Porsche six. The teacup pistons and short stroke help it yawp around the tach in tenorous barks. You stare down that hood, that famously central tach framed by a handful of auxiliary gauges. The pedals hinge up from the floor, and the A-pillar is almost in your face, because the dash is only a few inches deep. The synchros in the close-ratio five-speed, a Porsche design, famously feel like rubber. They make every shift a unique combination of quick and slow, a precise fling that has to land somewhere between smooth enough to not hurt the gearbox and fast enough to be useful.

Richard Pardon

The gearbox thing is just one of the car's rules. Old 911s have a lot of rules. Le Mans winner Hurley Haywood once said that everything in a rear-engine Porsche comes down to how you come off the brakes, and so it is here. If you don’t carefully bend the car into a corner, pinning the nose with the middle pedal, the car seems to bob and sniff, burning speed by sliding the front tires or just kind of gliding around beneath the limit. But if you solve the puzzle, the car leads with its hips. You paint it through the landscape in smeary little drifts. The taillights move on a throttle lift or even a breathe, faster than a slew but slower than a snap. And the huge traction mean a slide is always fixable with more throttle.

Which hints at the greatness of any old 911: The car begs you to rail on it. All 911s carry a lot of weight out back, but the suspension geometry of early cars is less than ideal, even by period standards. They seem happiest castering around. After 1968, Porsche extended the 911's wheelbase by 2.3 inches, to aid high-speed stability. The change worked, but a pre-’69 911 is a tame hummingbird — friendly and compliant, never still.

It’s easy to understand why the world fell in love, and also why some people hate it.

Richard Pardon

Our 911 ran a 1:52.46 around Spring Mountain, almost three seconds faster than the 360-hp, nearly 4500-pound Macan GTS we brought for comparison. Discount the speed added by our '67's modern race rubber — the current owner regularly campaigns the car in vintage-race events — and you’re left with something like parity, which is crazy. Moreso when you consider how little the two machines have in common, save a general sense of precision, and a tolerance for abuse. The GTS has nice, linear steering, but the 911’s wheel is a revelation, perpetually abuzz with information. The air-cooled car needs you to learn its language, where the GTS just wants to go faster, wants more curbs and more throttle, and to spit torque where the steering is pointed, vectoring into magically transparent slides. As on the 911, the brakes seem unkillable. There is one available transmission, a seven-speed twin-clutch automatic, and like the rest of the car, it works best when you don’t think too much about its work or try to outsmart it. The new car asks as little of you as the old one demands that you play by its rules.

Richard Pardon

A Macan is a fine thing, probably the best-engineered machine in its class, and its profit margin likely helps Porsche continue to build sports cars. But history tends to forget fine. Fine doesn’t ring with a sense of purpose that keeps people coming back for half a century. Just as a 0–60 time isn’t the same as a story you know by heart, a car that leads with its hips, or a noise that won’t leave your head.

Richard Pardon

BMW | 1972 3.0 CSL & 2017 X5 M

I met Brian Redman last year. We were at the New York auto show, standing next to the 1975 BMW 3.0 CSL that he and Allan Moffat drove to a win at the 12 Hours of Sebring in 1975.

Redman was 79, dressed dapperly. He smiled, warmly, as we stood next to the CSL. The car seemed little more than fiberglass and air.

I asked him what it was like. He thought for a moment.

“Flexy,” he finally said.

I glanced at the roll cage, which appeared insubstantial, as cages are not supposed to. Metal toothpicks under even thinner pillars. Redman spoke again, his English burr a bit softer.

“Oh, but it was very nice. And a wunnderful noise.”

The 3.0 CSL was built by a company whose middle name is literally Motor. Noise is what these people do — responsive, silky, almost unburstable engines.

The Bavarian Motor Works was founded in 1916, but the company didn’t hit its stride until the mid-Sixties, when it began a 30-year run of success in both touring-car racing and the sport-sedan market. And that glory was rooted in one engine. In 1962, still reeling from World War II, BMW released the 1500 four-door. That car’s 80-hp, 1.5-liter, overhead-cam four was a leapfrog moment, simple and stout and remarkably suited to growth. It used an overengineered iron block and a stout aluminum head holding two valves per cylinder. Variations found their way into everything from 1000-plus-hp Brabham F1 cars to the championship-winning, first-generation M3. With two cylinders added, that four became the M30 straight-six, powering, among other things, BMW's Karmann-bodied CS coupe. Reengineered to take a twin-cam head, the M30’s basic block design carried on in the M1 supercar, the first-generation M6, and the first two generations of M5.

Richard Pardon

That evolution represents midcentury automotive engineering in a nutshell: Logical changes to chase low-hanging fruit (at least compared with today’s cars), big gains with every step, a visible tech transfer from racing to road cars, and engineering advances easily comprehended by ordinary people. A five-year-old could look under the hood of a roadgoing CS and the Sebring-winning 3.0 CSL and know that the two are brothers. One more reason why racing once helped sell cars.

And why BMW took to the track. With outputs ranging from 180 to 203 hp, the 1972–1975 3.0 CSL, for Coupe Sport Light, was the company’s first big-league modern icon, sold to the public in order to legalize certain modifications on CS race cars. This meant touches like aluminum body panels to save weight, plexiglass windows on early examples, a monster fiberglass wing, and a roof spoiler. Competition CSLs went to Le Mans, Sebring, the Nürburgring, and Daytona, and were driven by legends like Niki Lauda and Hans Stuck. Their looks earned them the nickname “Batmobiles.”

Richard Pardon

Our test car was the first CSL to try to enter an FIA race. In 1972, while in private hands, it went to the Dutch Paasraces and was turned away, because BMW had yet to homologate the model. (Race officials didn't believe the company would make an aluminum-paneled coupe.) It later won the 1975 Dutch touring-car championship, in the Levi’s livery seen here. Like many racing CSLs, it sports gargantuan fiberglass flares; a fuel-injected, 3.5-liter M30 making more than 400 hp; and vintage-style slicks the size of kettle drums. Plus a close-ratio five-speed and a pair of straight pipes so loud, the 32-decibel earplugs that I wear on magazine tests out of habit — race cars are loud, and hearing damage is a real concern — couldn’t keep the engine’s wail from turning into pain.

I should have taken them out anyway.

What do you get from a legendary engine maker in the prime of a golden era? A sound like the trumpets of hell, for one thing. At 4500 rpm, the CSL spit out a pissy, off-kilter snort. At 6500, it was fully on cam, howling the kind of skin-tingling yell that used to be common in Formula 1, just deeper and with more mating animal.

The driver's seat in a CSL is surprisingly far back, the dash a million miles away. Because the roof pillars are thin and the roof small, window glass is everywhere. The car feels unnecessarily large, because it wasn’t built to meet government regulations regarding driver placement or rollover crush, because those wouldn't exist for years. The car was created simply to make a wispy design statement, and that meant a roof like a flowing cape.

Richard Pardon

The package works shockingly well. Next to the 911 and the D-type, the BMW feels like a normal car: front-engine, rear-wheel-drive, no odd manners. You can almost kid yourself into thinking the thing is modern, because it requires no special instructions. The car turns in hyperquickly but must be gently muscled over an apex. The springs and dampers are soft and paired to fat tire sidewalls, but the nose isn’t reluctant to point. You can’t brake as deeply as in the 911, but the pedal is consistent and transparent. The engine-driven mechanical fuel injection (no computer, just a couple of analog pumps) is flawlessly compliant and flexible. Slides come sleepily, in big, fast-hand dabs. It feels like the world’s screamiest couch.

The CSL is faster than the X5 M. Of course it is. The slicks and weight and focus let the race car carry more speed in corners, help it brake better and point more aggressively. Astonishingly, the 5299-pound X5 isn’t far off. The engine is a relatively lag-free, 4.4-liter, 567-hp, twin-turbo V-8, but the power isn’t as impressive as how it gets used.

The X5’s platform is the oldest of our three SUVs. In the middle of a corner, it does things that the F-Pace and Macan seem to have evolved beyond — a pause after you pick up the throttle, for example, as the active differentials figure out where to send torque and trim understeer. Like a lot of fast modern trucks, it's also goofy as hell: Pair suspension travel with big mass and grunt, you get a machine that doesn’t care if you hammer over curbs with two wheels in the air, that doesn’t slow down much when tires find dirt. The body motions are hysterical, just big, controlled whomping. As with the 911, it took patience to keep the X5’s fun habits from upsetting a fast lap.



All of which prompts questions: Is it nuts that we can now discuss two-ton übertrucks in the same manner as purpose-built race cars? SUVs aren’t allowed at most track days and no one races them, so why are the good ones engineered to be so happy under abuse? Should we applaud this sort of thing, boo it, or just not care, so long as we get Jaguar F-types, new 911s, and BMWs like the M4 GTS?

Richard Pardon

If I’m honest, I don’t know. Just as I don’t really know what an X5 M has in common with a 3.0 CSL. We assembled these machines looking for broad strokes, but the BMWs were the most disparate pair in our group. The more I drove either car, the more I went down rabbit holes of philosophy. As a car enthusiast and weirdo racing nerd, I don’t want a trackable SUV that weighs as much as a house, but I know people who do, and they’re not idiots. I also know a lot of people who believe crossovers represent a kind of selling out on the part of their makers, and those people aren't wrong, either. Finally, I know a handful of folks who own an M4 GTS or a 911 GT3 or something similar, plus a hot SUV, because they need a fun family vehicle for everyday use, and fast wagons are getting harder to come by, so why not?

There’s logic in each approach. The hope lies in the fact that these machines exist at all. That someone, somewhere, opted to not make each a mindless transport pod or a fluffy marketing exercise. Somebody gives a rip.

Our test consumed a day. As the sun set at the end, I couldn't stop looking at the vintage iron. I’ve seen the shapes of these cars all my life — in books, at the track, in museums — but something at Spring Mountain made them seem different. Race cars from these eras have climbed in value over the past decade, to the point where some owners have grown reluctant to track them. The people who use these machines for their intended purpose are now the exception, not the rule. In the waning light, our three test cars seemed oddly ethereal, like they might disappear if I looked at them too long.

I briefly wondered if the men and women behind these cars appreciate how special they are — the uniqueness of the moment that allowed their achievements to exist. It’s cliché, but I was reminded of flowers in springtime, and how they always seem brighter and more colorful in memory.

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Maybe that’s not such a terrible analogy. On a long enough timeline, the same fate comes to everything we create. Especially race cars, especially these. How lucky we were to have them in the first place.

Track Notes & Lap Times

SPRING MOUNTAIN MOTORSPORTS RANCH | VILLENEUVE COURSE A

PARUMPH, NV | 2.2 MILES | 13 TURNS

R&T Staff

1972 BMW 3.0 CSL: 1:47.73

1967 PORSCHE 911 S: 1:52.46

2017 BMW X5 M: 1:53.44



2017 PORSCHE MACAN GTS: 1:55.29

2017 JAGUAR F-PACE S: 1:59.79



1954 JAGUAR D-TYPE: 2:02.96



A. Turn 1 is long, a good indicator of balance. 911 is fastest here, at 78.6 mph, thanks largely to lots of tire for its weight. The CSL nips at its heels, around 1 mph slower. The D-type, X5 M, Macan, and F-Pace see 70–71 mph. Save the X5, the SUVs slide all wheels evenly here — the BMW, constantly shuffling torque, never settles down.



B. Turns 5, 6, and 7 create a complex section with minor elevation and camber change. 911 is the most fun here, dancing constantly. Amazingly, despite weight and balance penalties, all three SUVs shuttle power around well enough to rotate here, which helps keep them from losing significant time to the race cars.

C. D-type is second fastest through Turn 10, at 43.9 mph, yawing, to the CSL’s more stable 47.1. Credit the Jaguar’s 1900-pound weight, its broad torque, and corner geometry that favors the car’s live axle.

D. Back straight: Brute grunt and traction off Turn 10 mean the X5 M is fastest before braking — 115.2 mph — despite having the aerodynamic drag of a small building.