JustBritish

After years of plant closures in the region’s car industry (think MG Rover, Peugeot, Jaguar at Brown’s Lane), news this week that JLR will build its new engine plant near Wolverhampton will provide a major boost. This according to the Birmingham News.

The new plant will be based at the i54 business park, in the Black Country’s new enterprise zone. As such, the new plant could well qualify for enhanced capital allowances which could see JLR getting tax breaks for big investments in plant and equipment (hats off by the way to AWM for their work in readying the site, local authorities and the Black Country LEP for pulling off Enterprise Zone status, and to the government for backing the investment).

But as well as tax breaks, the location makes a lot of sense in other ways. Just off the M54 motorway, the site is close to JLR’s assembly plants in the Midlands and on Merseyside, so means that engines can be transported quickly to JLR’s Castle Bromwich, Solihull and Halewood plants. And the region still offers a rich engineering skills base on which the new plant can draw.

The plant is likely to involve a £355 million investment, could employ as many as 750 workers, and – depending on how many components JLR sources locally – could bring more jobs and wider benefits to the region’s components industry.

JLR currently buys engines from its previous owner Ford, but with JLR production being ramped up, it has struggled to source enough engines from Ford’s UK engine plants at Dagenham and Bridgend. JLR wants more control over the supply of its engines, and has the in-house engineering skills needed to develop new engines.

Read the complete article at the Birmingham News.

I was one of those people very disappointed by the Jaguar XJS, the car that replaced the E-Type Jag when it came out in the mid-Seventies. To me, it wasn’t a sports car at all, but more of a boulevard cruiser. Since then, there have been sporting Jaguars, for sure, but no real sports car. The E-Type is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful cars of all time, so making something as gorgeous again is an incredibly difficult task. But 50 years on from the creation of the E-Type, Jaguar has come closer than ever to matching its beauty.

Its latest model, though, the C-X16, which is being shown in Frankfurt at the moment, has all the styling clues of a Jaguar sports car and especially the E-Type. I love the rear end; the twin exhausts look great, as do the rear lights. The whole car works and looks like a modern interpretation of the E-Type. I don’t have a lot of interest in the convertible though, to be honest. For me, coupés are always where it’s at.

Crucially, I think it shows that the age of Jaguar in desperation is over. It’s now an extremely successful company, it’s making a profit and it’s making a car that it is enjoying building. Let me qualify that; if the new XJ had not been the tremendous success that it is, the C-X16 wouldn’t even have made it to the drawing board. Jaguar built the car it needed to build and now the company is planning to build the fun car it wanted to build. It’s a measure of the confidence Jaguar has when it goes into such a highly competitive market.

The preceding is part of an article written by famed talk-show host and auto enthusiast Jay Leno published in The National. For the rest of the fantastic article, please check out their site.

Classic and Sports car Magazine reported on the first and last of the fabled E-types recently coming together for the first time ever at Sandown Park in Surrey. The cars in question were 1 VHP, as featured in the October issue of C&SC, the first production right-hand-drive fixed-head coupé commonly known as Chassis Number 1, and HDU 555N, the last S3 V12 to leave the Browns Lane factory.

The Sandown event was a collaboration between Jaguar Heritage, Classic Motor Cars of Bridgnorth and Barry Potter Fairs, yet another outing to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the landmark British design.

More than 4000 visitors to the show also saw other important E-types, including two more from the current issue of C&SC: the famed Lindner-Nocker Lightweight and 1600 RW, the first E-type to be sold.

Other highlights included Jag test driver Norman Dewis signing copies of his new book, the launch of Peter Driver’s The Toy Jaguar Book and a 28-car concours that was won, appropriately, by the 1969 Series 2 roadster of Michael Quinn, Sir William Lyons’ grandson.

The picture shows Quinn, along with Dewis, CMC’s Peter Neumark and Barry Potter with the “first and last” E-types.

UK auto site Autoblog.com has a great, and hilarious, story on what must me one of the oddest match-ups since Oscar and Felix in the Odd Couple. Actually, I guess this predates them, but you get the point!

What we have then is a hybrid Jaguar Morris Minor Traveller. Well, to be precise, a Jaguar XK120 Morris Minor Traveller; that is also probably full of fur. The car was created to haul the owner’s dogs. To make matters even worse, they named the car the “Foxbat”. What? What the heck is a “foxbat”?

Quoting from the original article, “it was stitched together by chemist and Jaguar enthusiast/butcher Geoffrey Stevens. To give him some credit, it’s claimed the XK was in pretty horrendous condition when he started, so he’s done a decent job making the front end look good, at least.”

Sorry, I give up.

The speed and elegance of one of motoring’s iconic cars of all time — the sleek Jaguar E-Type — reveals itself as the inspiration for the official poster art of the 2011 Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion. Jaguar is this year’s featured marque and will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the E-Type at the annual gathering of historic race and sports cars to be held August 19-21 at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca during the Monterey Classic Car Week.

Renowned artist Bill Patterson, who is the official artist of Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca, says the E-Type is true art on wheels. “Having fallen in love with racing and fast cars in the ’60s, the E-Type represented the perfect blend of design, technology, performance and sex appeal. It still looks fantastic today, 50 years after it was first produced. And to have been able to see that magnificent, super-light E-Type blasting through the sunrise at Le Mans would have been spectacular. Painting it is the closest I’ll ever get,” Patterson adds.

The race paddock will be bustling with the sights, sounds and constant car movement that few fans can enjoy up close at professional races. A central part of the experience will be Jaguar Cars’ heritage display where guests can interact with Jaguar representatives and see firsthand the full lineage of race cars that has fostered international admiration for the marque.

More than 550 cars have been accepted to participate in the Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion. Race groups range from pre-1940 sports and touring race cars to the thunderous historic Trans-Am and Can-Am cars of the ’60s and early ’70s. The most modern era cars will be seen in Group 6B’s 1981-89 FIA Manufacturers Championship cars and IMSA GTP.

Tickets, hospitality packages and reservations for general camping for the Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion are available by calling 800-327-7322 or available online at www.MazdaRaceway.com.

You may think of the French as producing the most strikingly streamlined cars of the 1930s, in lyric teardrop bodies hammered out with doses of Italian style and German science. But in his book “Art Deco and British Car Design: The Airline Cars of the 1930s“, Barrie Down reminds us that streamline design was the rage among car buffs everywhere in the ’30s, even in upright, country-house, Evelyn Waugh Britain.

Mr. Down reminds us that at the same time streamline cars were going on the market, ocean liners and trains were being streamlined, the better to compete with the nascent airline industry. His book also reminds us that the automobile industry of the time in Britain had yet to embrace mass production. Cars were sold to the few, and the sellers were coachbuilders as much as chassis or engine makers.

To compete, each British car company had to offer a version of the season’s fashionable cut, and so each one presented an airline or streamline body or two. The resulting cars are rare, with wonderful names like the Triumph Gloria Flow-Free and the Riley Kestrel.

Many of these companies would not survive. But there are also glimpses of the future. We meet the young William Lyons, who impressed a man named William Walmsley. Together, their Swallow Sidecar company moved from teardrop add-ons for motorcycles to aero bodies for popular auto chassis. Swallow became Jaguar, of course, and two decades later produced more serious streamlining, driven by aerodynamics and racing.

“Art Deco and British Car Design: The Airline Cars of the 1930s” by Barrie Downs was published in December of 2010 by Veloce Publishing. It is a gorgeous book of 144 pages with a suggested retail of $44.95.