Jaguar takes over Le Mans Classic... with 100 cars

Welcome to the Le Mans Classic, the bi-annual heritage event that follows the modern Le Mans a fortnight after Webber and co. have gone home. Cars from the 1920s to 1990s are welcome, and run day and night in period-grouped classes. In 2014, 50,000 people went to watch. This year? Over 120,000. It’s a huge, glorious, mesmerising event.

Jaguar has reams of heritage with la Sarthe, and planned a 100-car parade around the 8.5-mile circuit last Saturday afternoon. So, TG was entrusted with delivering one of the F-type SVRs down to the circuit. They get their postcard, and we get to spend several hundred miles in the first 200mph Jag since the XJ200. Deal.

Let’s rewind for a moment and have a look at the journey. It seemed appropriate to retrace the route that Jaguar used to send its C- and D-Types along when they competed for real back in the Fifties. Course, they couldn’t hop onto a train with a baguette and speed under the English Channel in 35 minutes. But even Norman Dewis would’ve winced at threading an F-type onto a Chunnel carriage. The SVR is seriously, dangerously wide, and the train isn’t. The sidewalls are squealing against the metal kerbs like Dunlop crossplies on the Porsche curves.

About 70km south of Calais there’s a town called Le Touquet. In 1955, the Jaguar team had their D-types flown into Le Touquet’s modest airfield and unloaded on French soil. The cars were then to be driven down to Le Mans a further 370km south, running in the D-types and generally troubleshooting the cars along the way.

If you’re familiar with Le Mans you’ll recognise 1955 as a year of infamy, for the 35th lap crash which claimed the life of Mercedes 300 SLR driver Pierre Levegh and an estimated 83 spectators on the home straight. The crash saw Mercedes retire from the race and GT motorsport itself, and caused the Swiss to ban domestic motorsport entirely until Formula E was granted clemency just last year.

1955 was also a year of personal tragedy for Jaguar founder Sir William Lyons. His son, John Michael, groomed as a successor to his old man had protested intensely over his father’s refusal to allow him Le Mans participation, citing the danger. Sir William eventually relented on the proviso that his boy found a job with the team and made himself useful.

That job was delivering a car to the circuit, and John was killed in a crash with an American military tank south of Le Touquet, having apparently failed to drive on the opposite side of the road when in France. Debonair and devil-may-care as this era of racing was, the attrition rate of young lives was truly appalling.

Respect duly paid to Lyons Jnr, we surge southward in a machine he and his father couldn’t have dreamt possible. The Special Vehicle Ops Jag is effectively an F-type R AWD with the heart of the Project 7, developing 25bhp more than standard and capable of the magic 200mph with the active rear wing in low-drag V-max mode.

This car is fitted with 20-inch forged wheels, a necessary evil to stretch over the ceramic brakes. Combined cost? More than a whole E-type in the Sixties, at £8,570. The SVR also has adaptive suspension with all-new geometry and beefier components. Its exhaust is made from stuff that was barely on the Periodic Table when Lyons was signing off Jags.

Given that specification, you’d be forgiven for presuming the SVR is a hard-riding, tramlining, brow-furrowing nutter. I did. I was very wrong. The SVO development is subtle, and has resulted in a very capable GT car. It rides more pliantly than the last normal F-Type I drove, with a dollop more control when asked to smother a bump while the suspension’s already loaded up in a corner. And it will be loaded, because even with carbon brakes and wotnot, the SVR’s well over 1700kg in weight, which is a heck of a lot for an aluminium two-seater, even one with all-wheel drive, torque-vectoring, a supercharged 5.0-litre V8 and heated 14-way electrically motorised seats.

The SVR can also cruise very quietly, without transmitting deafening tyre-roar into the cabin like a 911. It’s oddly frugal, returning an easy 350 miles to a tank on a cruise. The quilted bucket seat is supremely comfortable. None of this really squares with what you expect of the ultimate hardcore version of a sports car, but that’s where the SVR is quite clever. It abandons the futile chase to make the heavy, sometimes clumsy F-Type react and flit around like a Porsche. SVO has amplified the best bits about the standard car – mainly noise, pomp and handsomeness. That said, I’d delete the clunky rear wing and show off that elegant posterior without the carbon carbuncle.

Le Mans arrives ahead of the bulbous bonnet simmering in 39 degrees of July heat. Sat in the paddock tailing a snake of other SVRs, I’ve got the glass roof’s blind (in lieu of a lighter carbon panel) shut to fend off heatsoak. I’m expecting a fairly sedate pace around the lap. The photographers need to score a tricky tracking shot of the 1988-winning Silk Cut XJR-9 and unique XJ13 sandwiched by an F-Pace and F-Type, ahead of the amassed C, E and F-types, plus XK120s and XK150s among others. Slow progress is fine with me, given the value of nearby machinery and how stressful my last lap of la Sarthe was...

Impeccably behaved, the cavalcade draws out of the hazy pit lane and through Dunlop curves. We’re waving to the appreciative crowd, who wave back and take photographs as we cruise under the brief shadow of Dunlop Bridge and sweep downhill to Terte Rouge. A few of the SVR drivers are coasting then bursting forwards to bathe the crowd in a wave of V8 noise. I shift into neutral on the downhill run from Dunlop and join the cacophony. It sounds like a packet of bangers being let off inside a filing cabinet and pushed down a ravine. The naughty F-Types at the tail of the snake are the badly-behaved delinquents swinging on their chairs and making rude noises at the back of class.  Eventually the anarchy will spread.

By the second chicane on the Mulsanne straight, the F-Types are restless. They’re braking hard and accelerating violently, and making attempts to take the racing line and carve up the straggling F-Paces maintaining order. Eventually, it’s a French owner in a blue coupe who breaks ranks, leading a charge of privately owned Jags down the centre of the Mulsanne kink and howling off toward Arnage. The game’s up now.

From thereon out it’s a multi-million pound melee of low-drag E-Types, howling C-Types and race-prepped Mk2s jostling and tailing one another through the Le Mans lap. It’s madness. Brilliant, breathless yet respectful madness. The F-Types are spaceships in this company, weighing twice as much as the classics but able to brake much later with their carbon ceramics to the C-Types’ drums. The low drag E-Types are a sterner test, but getting to ogle one is recompense for not striding straight past. What an impossibly cool motor car. It should be fuelled with dry martini and lubricated with Brylcreem.

Modern tyres mean we can drive around the outside of the old-timers with impunity, but the plucky pensioners are brave and happy to weave down the straights to set themselves up a more convenient trajectory through the apex. This gets rather dicey. My chest aches on the haul towards the Porsche curves and I realise I’ve been holding my breath since Arnage.

I cross the start-finish line with a hard-top E-type and set off on a second lap. The field is more strung out now, so the drivers can follow the flow of the circuit. What a monumental lap this is. It’s a collection of drag strips connected by corners christened with the most evocative names in motorsport.

The classics have got more tyre temperature now, and they’re sticking it to the young pretenders, diving into the Esses and showing how much fun life was before traction control by slewing across the kerbs with corrective lock being fervently fed through slim steering wheels. Thinking about it, what was anyone thinking getting a group of 100 Jaguar drivers together and expecting them to all behave? We’re cads, we’re absolute bounders. Several minutes later, we’re all safely back in the pits giggling and blowing our cheeks out. I hope Lyons and co would’ve been proud.