McQueen sold the XKSS to casino owner and car collector Bill Harrah in the 1970s, but bought the car back in 1978 and owned it until he died in 1980. Time & Life Pictures
LIKE THE C-TYPE BEFORE IT, the Jaguar D-type was one of the landmark race cars of the 1950s. Not only did it have Malcolm Sayer’s beautiful, iconic design, but it also fulfilled Jaguar founder William Lyons’s desire to win France’s 24 Hours of Le Mans.
Frank “Lofty” England was the mastermind behind much of Jaguar’s track success. He served his engineering apprenticeship with Daimler before joining Jaguar in 1946. Owing to his 6-foot-5-inch height, England acquired the nickname Lofty in the 1920s, and it stuck with him for life.
Jaguar had no motorsport plans after the end of World War II, but Jaguar and England quickly realized the potential of Bill Heynes and Walter Hassan’s XK engine. The company’s newly formed Racing Department provided six top prewar drivers with lightweight, preproduction, aluminum-bodied XK 120s in 1949, and the results were encouraging.
Although small victories piled up with the XK 120 model, Jaguar boss William Lyons and England realized it was too heavy and aerodynamically compromised ever to win at Le Mans. Their solution was to install the XK 120 drivetrain in a new lightweight chassis and streamlined body. The Malcolm Sayer–designed XK 120C (for competition), later known as the C-type, raced for the last time at the 1951 Le Mans race.
England’s new racing team outsmarted 19 cars with engines bigger than the C-type’s, and Sayer had shaped Jaguar’s first Le Mans winner. He went on to design the iconic D-type. After working for the Bristol Aeroplane Company, Sayer was steeped in the laws of aerodynamics by the time he went to work for Jaguar in 1950. Sayer’s working methods involved plotting the coordinates of curves with slide rules and logarithmic tables. He also pioneered the use of wind tunnels to test a car’s aerodynamic properties.
After another Le Mans victory in 1953, Lofty England decided that Jaguar had taken the C-type as far as it could, and he developed a new car around the winning XK engine. The resulting D-type was unveiled at the 1954 24 Hours of Le Mans race, where drivers Duncan Hamilton and Tony Rolt were beaten into second place by only one lap by the Ferrari 375 of Formula One stars Jose Gonzalez and Maurice Trintignant.
Le Mans in 1955 was expected to be a contest between Jaguar and the Mercedes-Benz team of Alfred Neubauer. But an accident triggered by driver Mike Hawthorn’s D-type caused the deaths of Mercedes driver Pierre Levegh and 83 spectators, as pieces of the crashed Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR sliced through the crowd. Mercedes-Benz withdrew from the race and urged Jaguar to do the same, but England refused.
After the race, which Jaguar’s D-Type won, Lofty England drew criticism for his decision, but maintained for the rest of his life that he didn’t think Hawthorn was responsible for the tragedy and thus saw no reason to withdraw. According to people who knew him, this was typical of England’s hard-nosed manner in which he ran the team.
The 1956 24 Hours of Le Mans was the last outing for the works Jaguar team. But there was no swan song for Lofty England’s crew. A new, long nose D-type variant managed sixth place, and, fortunately for Jaguar, England encouraged private teams and ensured that they got as much help as Jaguar could offer. It was one of those teams, Ecurie Ecosse, which scored the D-type’s win that year. The Scottish team also won the race with an England-supplied, ex-works long-nose car in 1957.
In America the Briggs Cunningham team raced several D-types. A 1954 works car on loan to Cunningham won the 1955 12 Hours of Sebring in the hands of Mike Hawthorn and Phil Walters, and in May 1956 entries for Maryland’s Cumberland National Championship Sports Car Race included four D-types in Cunningham’s white and blue racing colors.
An unsung hero of Jaguar’s track victories was engineer Norman Dewis. Dewis set up a testing department when he joined Jaguar in 1952 and created over six hundred tests. He set a speed record with the D-type in 1953 and drove in both the Mille Miglia rally in Italy and at Le Mans. But what Dewis was proudest of, according to Jaguar, was his development of the disc brake with Dunlop.
Following Jaguar’s withdrawal from racing, Lofty England returned to his role as head of Jaguar’s service department. He turned down an offer to buy the Vanwall Formula One team and then began climbing the corporate ladder within Jaguar. When Sir William (who was knighted in 1956) retired from Jaguar in late 1967, Lofty England and Bill Haynes succeeded him as co-directors of the company.
McQueen sold the XKSS to casino owner and car collector Bill Harrah in the 1970s, but bought the car back in 1978 and owned it until he died in 1980. Time & Life Pictures
There were still 25 D-types in inventory when Jaguar ceased racing in late 1956, and, according to Road & Track, Briggs Cunningham encouraged Jaguar to add another 25 D-types, the total of 50 meeting the Sports Car Club of America’s rules to qualify for production sports car racing in the United States.
At the same time, race driver Duncan Hamilton urged Jaguar to build a road-going D-type, having given his own 1954 works car a veneer of civility in the form of a windshield and weather protection for use as an occasional road car.
Jaguar changed the model number of the cars from XKD to XKSS, the initials standing for Super Sport. Externally, the factory added minimal bumpers to protect the aluminum bodywork, a luggage rack for touring, turn signals, larger taillights, and a full-width windshield. Specially designed body-colored alloy panels anchored into the bodywork held the side pillars of the curved windshield in place.
For the XKSS, the distinctive D-type headrest and fin were removed. For creature comfort, side windows and a rudimentary folding fabric top were added. Also, the center divider between driver and passenger was removed and the rider got a door.
Little changed mechanically. XKSS buyers got the same 250-horsepower, dry-sump 3.4-liter DOHC straight-six engine that moved the Jaguar to 60 miles per hour in just 5.2 seconds on the way to its 149 miles per hour top speed, according to Road & Track. The XKSS cars also had the same rack-and-pinion steering and disc brakes as the Competition D-type.
The cars weighed around 1,950 pounds and rode on a 90.6-inch wheelbase. D-types had a complex multi-tubular front frame, with separate monocoque center and tail sections. They also featured an all-synchromesh four-speed transmission. Suspension was conventional upper/lower wishbones and torsion bars in front, with a live axle and trailing links in the back.
The steering wheel and seats were nonadjustable. While developing the roadster, according to noted British sports car expert Hartmut Lehbrink, Jaguar invited four people of different stature to try out the seats, and a universal seating position was established. Instruments consisted of a large speedometer and tachometer to the left of the steering column and small oil pressure and water temperature gauges to the right.
Jaguar unveiled the road-going XKSS at the December 1956 New York Auto Show, where Jaguar took orders from buyers anxious to get their street-legal D-types. Work on converting the 25 remaining D-Types to XKSS specifications was underway when disaster struck.
A fire at the Browns Lane factory in Coventry on February 12, 1957, destroyed not only nine of the cars, but all the special tooling, jigs, and wooden bucks needed to form the XKSS’s body. The fire ended the production run of the XKSS cars just as they were peaking in popularity.
The fire was etched in the memory of a worker who rescued cars as the factory burned around him. Brian Martin, a father of two from Solihull, was working on an assembly line and was putting in overtime on a saloon car that had come off the production tracks.
Martin told Britain’s Coventry Evening Telegraph that he had finished the job and was preparing to head home when he heard the fire alarm. “I looked back and saw the roof on fire, right next to the tire bay, which is where I had moved from. The lining of the roof was melting and sending burning material on to the floor and starting fires everywhere,” he told the newspaper.
Help! was Martin’s first thought, but he and all the office staff bravely tried to save as many of the drivable Jaguars as they could. The blaze gutted half the factory, which employed four thousand people.
Martin told the newspaper the fire started around 5:45 p.m. and had high praise for the Coventry Fire Brigade, whose 19 engines arrived at Browns Lane within 20 minutes, and their crews were able to save at least half the plant from ruin.
In Britain’s House of Commons on February 28, the Minister of Labour assured House members that all the regulations of Britain’s Factories Act were properly observed and that Jaguar had an excellent record “not only in its products but in its relationship with its workers and the care it takes of them.”
Jaguar was able to resume 50 percent of production within just five days of the fire, but nearly three hundred cars had been turned to scrap. The 16 remaining XKSS cars were delivered and remain treasured keepsakes among Jaguar aficionados. Twelve of the cars were reportedly shipped to America, two to Canada, one to Hong Kong, and one remained in Britain.
At least two of the XKSS cars went to California. One went to American movie and television actor Hugh O’Brien, best known for his starring role in the ABC western The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp. The other was sold to building contractor James Patterson of Altadena, a suburb of Los Angeles. Patterson later sold the car to radio and television personality Bill Leyden, famous for announcing The Liberace Program on radio and hosting six TV game shows on NBC.
Between takes of the CBS television series Wanted: Dead or Alive, Steve McQueen often tinkered with his beloved Jaguar XKSS. Time & Life Pictures
While the car still belonged to Leyden in 1958, actor Steve McQueen, then just beginning his role as bounty hunter Josh Randall in the CBS television series Wanted: Dead or Alive, saw the XKSS parked on a studio lot in Los Angeles. He subsequently bought the car from Leyden for a reported $5,000 and twice almost lost his license speeding in it.
In his book Jaguar Sports Racing Cars, Phillip Porter notes that McQueen’s car was originally painted white with red interior, but he had it repainted British Racing Green, had the interior redone in black leather, and added a locking glove box. In the 1970s McQueen sold the car to casino owner Bill Harrah to add to his 1,450-plus car collection in Reno, Nevada. Around 1978 McQueen bought the car back and owned it until he died in 1980.
In 1984 McQueen’s XKSS was sold at auction to his friend Richard Freshman for $148,000. Freshman then had the car refurbished by Jaguar experts, Lynx Motors Ltd., in Britain. Freshman later sold the car to Margie and Robert Petersen of Hot Rod magazine and Petersen Automotive Museum fame.
A Jaguar reunion at the 2010 Pebble Beach Concours hosted 12 of the surviving 16 XKSS cars, including the one once owned by McQueen. There are actually 18 XKSS cars, because two of the original D-Types were returned to Jaguar in 1958 to be converted to XKSS specifications. One of those two belonged to American fashion designer Ralph Lauren.
When new, the XKSS sold for $5,600, about twice the price of an XK 120. But in 2003, an XKSS sold for over $1 million. Its original owner was James Grove of St. Louis, Missouri, but it had passed through many more owners and undergone several restorations by 2003.
Some Jaguar fans think the XKSS’s appeal was diluted by the replicas built in both America and Britain. Cars with genuine pedigrees are more likely to fetch top dollar, such as the C-type once owned and raced by Phil Hill that sold at auction in 2009 for $2,530,000. But because none are on the market, on that rare occasion when an XKSS is offered for sale, it will no doubt be significant.
Its jaw-dropping appeal remains. A review in the May 3, 1957, issue of British magazine The Autocar ran out of superlatives for the XKSS. Short legs were recommended for a ride of any duration in the cramped passenger cabin, the reviewer wrote, but the lower limbs of the many people wanting to accompany him on the test drive suddenly seemed miraculously to shrink.
Tragedy—in the form of the 1955 Le Mans crash and the 1957 factory fire—seemed to haunt the C- and D-type Jaguars. That said, there are far fewer authentic XKSS cars now, and that rarity has made an already iconic car into a coveted jewel of the automotive world.