It's cramped inside and when driving it you need all your senses to keep it on the track. But if you take a quick look around, you'll start to wonder about this car.
Fresh leather, smooth glossy paint, and a ridiculously low mileage — there's nothing to suggest that we're driving a million-dollar classic car around a test track. The C-Type looks like a car from 1953 and yet it’s new. So what’s going on?
The solution to the riddle
What's racing through the summer in the British Midlands is the first C-Type from the so-called Continuation Series. With this series, the British car maker is reviving some of its famous models.
"We use the latest techniques to rebuild the cars according to old plans with original materials," says Jaguar Classic manager David Foster. "If there is a demand from collectors and there is business in it for us, then a project like this has good chances."
Jaguar started with the lightweight version of the E-Type from 1963, followed by the XKSS from 1957 and then the D-Type, which made Jaguar the series winner at Le Mans from 1955 to 1957.
Prices for these "new" classics range from £1.2 to £1.75 million plus taxes. That’s a lot of money, but still a lot less than an original model would cost.
In the case of the C-Type, for example, Foster estimates the price difference to be as much as six million pounds.
And a lot of work goes into them — up to 10,000 man-hours to build each individual vehicle, and that's not even counting the two or three years spent in the archives and in construction.
Classics being revived across the industry
Other car makers have also got in on the act. Bentley has rebuilt a dozen of the supercharged “Blower” Bentleys with which driver Tim Birkin competed at Le Mans in the late 1920s.
This summer, 12 examples of the Speed-Six that took victory at Le Mans in 1929 and 1930 were announced.
In 2017, Aston Martin recreated the 1960s DB4GT for £1.5 million each and then followed it up with 19 examples of the DB4GT Zagato.
It was expensive fun for those who wanted one, because it was only available in a double pack with a current DBS Zagato, it cost over €8 million.
The highlight of this development was the DB5 from the James Bond film “Goldfinger,” which the British reissued for the 25th anniversary of the 007 series.
Like in the film, the car has rotating license plates, (fake) machine guns behind the headlights, and a bullet-proof shield to cover the back window.
It’s not just British car manufacturers that are rebuilding their classic cars. Italian sports car maker Lamborghini spent 25,000 man-hours rebuilding the prototype of the first Countach.
However, according to Lamborghini's Alessandro Farmeschi, there was one crucial difference: unlike Jaguar & Co, the original Countach was a one-off that was destroyed in a crash test.
Is it about history or money?
There’s nothing wrong with these replicas, says classic car specialist Frank Wilke of Classic Analytics.
Firstly, the manufacturers make no secret of the year of manufacture and secondly, unlike outside companies, they literally have every right to make such replicas. They can also achieve maximum authenticity.
Even so, Wilke considers it to be mainly a money-making exercise with the manufacturers cannibalising their own history for cash. But the people who buy them probably don’t care.
"Because, first of all, they save a lot of money in the process, if the original is ever offered for sale at all,” he says. "And secondly, they usually get the better car.”
Jaguar's Foster thinks the practice is justified on economic grounds: "We're not a club, we're a business and we have to make a profit.”
Bentley’s Mike Sayer also sees benefits: "Projects like this allow us to develop new skills to maintain, protect, and preserve historic Bentleys — both originals and continuations. To keep these special cars ready for use for the future."
