Jaguar

Jaguar

Jaguar

Jaguar

Jaguar

Jaguar

Jaguar

Jaguar

Jaguar

Back in the mid-1950s, the Jaguar D-Type was what passed for a hypercar. It bristled with cutting-edge technology, and D-Types won Le Mans every year from 1955 to 1957. Today, the company revealed it is putting the racecar back into production, with a run of 25 new D-Types. The cars will be hand built at the Jaguar Land Rover Classic Works in Warwickshire in the UK using the original drawings and documents from the time.

The 1950s is when Jaguar cemented its reputation as a company on the cutting edge of automotive technology. Design chief Malcolm Sayer had already borrowed a couple of ideas from the aerospace industry for the C-Type racer, and the car maker introduced disc brakes and aerodynamics. But the D-Type was even more revolutionary.

Instead of a spaceframe like the C-Type (or Mercedes-Benz' rival 300 SLR), the D-Type used panels of aluminum welded together into a unibody chassis. It was the first time this approach had been used for a car, but not the last; in 2018, odds are overwhelmingly high that your vehicle also uses a monocoque chassis.

The new D-Type isn't the first time Jaguar has dipped into its back catalog. Starting in 2014, it built six new Lightweight E-Type racers and, in 2017, nine "lost" XKSSes. Like those cars, we don't expect a reissued D-Type to be particularly cheap. Prices haven't been announced yet, but we expect one to cost at least $1 million.

Yet, compared to one of the originals, a million bucks is actually a bargain: in 2016, one sold at auction for almost $22 million. But that $22 million example should be seen as an outlier: its race history and provenance have driven up the price. Still, even a ratty D-Type from the 1950s will set you back $3-4 million, making a 2018 D-Type a relative bargain in that context.

The new cars—Jaguar calls them a "continuation"—will be built to either 1955 "shortnose" or 1956 "longnose" specification, depending upon the buyer's wishes. And whoever those 25 lucky buyers are, they won't be able to show their D-Types on the road; for that, they should have gotten one of the XKSSes, which were built at the time using surplus D-Type chassis until a fire destroyed Jaguar's factory in 1957.

By the time of the fire, the company had built fewer than the 100 D-Types it originally promised. Opinions seem to differ on just how many: Jaguar says it built 75, while other sources say 71 if you don't count the 16 road-legal XKSSes (87 if you do).

As cool as these new D-Types will be, I've thought of a way to make one even better. You see, last year Classic Works went and built an electric powertrain that's a drop-in replacement for the XK engine and gearbox. I don't know about you, but I reckon the only EV cooler than an electric D-Type would be if someone shot a Tesla Roadster into the asteroid belt.

Listing image by Jaguar