On Wednesday, November 4 we'll gather at the Caddy Shack @ Rolling Hills Golf Course, 1415 North Mill Avenue, Tempe, AZ 85281-1205 (map). I've been going to Arizona Yacht Club meetings at this place for 15 years and I'm a big fan. Why? Here's why.
Bloody Good, is the tease splashed across the cover of the October 2015 issue of Automobile magazine. Inside, 8 full pages about the six lightweight E-Types just built by Jaguar's Heritage Workshop as "missing" lightweights, number issued by never built.
Spoiler alert: They like it. And they're also impressed by the Project 7 F-Type that shares the cover with the E. Here's flavor of it, the opening paragraph of the Project 7 review: "Back-to-back and over the top, our tests of the Jaguar F-Type Project 7 and Lightweight E-Type left eyes tearing from beauty overload, hearts bubbling, and lips whetted over Spain's curling Basque Country roads."
We may even have the chance to see the E-Type, since JCCA members John and Sonia Breslow were among the lucky few selected to buy one at a number Automobile places at $1.2 million or more.
By Mike Ferring
The Goodwood Festival of Speed is one of the world's premier car-nut events, a carnival of fantastic cars and people spread over the oh-so-gorgeous lawn of Lord March near Chichester, England.
It's actually several events happening simultaneously and drawing a crowd of more than 150,000 over four days. At the top of the hill it's World Rally through the woods. Next section down the hill, off-road trucks bounding over hills. Then the paddock of some of the greatest race cars that ever competed. A concours d'elegance with rare and beautiful cars. An "X-Games" style pit for flips and tricks. Manufacturers' pavilions with new cars and car "experiences." The centerpiece is the run just over a mile up the hill, a sort of hill climb to show off those great cars and great drivers (including Stirling Moss, Jackie Stewart, Nico Rosberg, Jensen Button, Kimi Raikkonen, Derek Bell, and motorcycle champions Valentino Rossi and Giacomo Augostini. Among others.)
Maryellen and I dove deep into the Festival this year, spending three days poking into every corner of the place. When she saw the "Jaguar Experience," she decided to wait some two hours to take a ride with a professional driver in an F-Type, doing smoking laps around a tiny oval. Giggle time.
Jaguar was well represented, not just with new cars, but with historic ones. A couple D-Types ran the hill. An XK220 appeared in the concours, but this was a one-off with a V-12 engine, as the car was originally planned to use.
Here are a bunch of pictures I took of the event, including a series with Maryellen at the Jaguar Experience (which used in-car cameras to show the ride on a big screen).
Goodwood Photos
Jaguar Heritage was out in force for this year's Mille Miglia and the company has produced a promotional film of its cars with stirring music and enthusiastic enthusiasts. It's fun to watch and you can find it here.
It's on. And the first group planning meeting of club members on Saturday, May 30, kicked it off: a national gathering of Jag people for the JCNA general meeting and this first "International Jaguar Festival." The two sessions are scheduled for the end of March and first of April 2016 and are expected to draw more than 400 people. The Festival will attract an amazing collection of cars for the Concours d'Elegance, rally, tour, and slalom.
In fact, for weeks president Robert Bronstein, Dennis Eynon, and Phil Parker have been hard at work lining up the venue and developing the complicated plan for getting this big event together.
At the planning meeting, the member group got an overview briefing and a list of some of the major pieces needed to pull it together, including an extensive "spouses" program.
The planning group will meet monthly until the event at this same spot, Marv's Garage in Scottsdale Air Park, the car storage operation owned by JCCA Vice President Rosemary Price.
The weather was perfect, the peaches tasty, the olive oil tour interesting, the memorabilia extensive and the final score was: peachy.
Alan Travis is a tour de force all by himself, an exciting evangelist for the time when cars were just being invented. Alan and Mary Travis's car collection is an automotive tour de force, an astonishing assemblage of some of the world's earliest cars, each in astonishing condition and each owned by just a handful of people in more than 100 years.
On Saturday, April 25, a troupe of JCCA people got the full show: Alan enthusiastically explaining the origin and development of his collection. He pointed to bicycles hanging from the ceiling that represented the earliest effort to move from animal-drawn transportation to something mechanical. One of the French bikes looked as if it came from Landis Bikes today. Then he began to roll out the cars.
One was an 1898 Jenaperrin, a French pioneer which Alan described as perhaps the oldest car in the US. It carried many of the basic design elements that continue today, including a steering wheel (instead of a tiller), brakes and accelerator.
In fact, Alan said that if you're looking for cars from the turn of the 20th century, look to France. The industrial revolution took root there sooner, there were more good roads and there were great artisans who began building cars, so the French cars led the way. In the US, early cars such as his 1904 Mitchell were likely built by wagon makers and it took some time to catch up.
The pride of his extraordinary collection was outside, the 1907 Renault grand prix car that ran the Vanderbilt Cup. It's an example of how the auto industry changed rapidly during that time, advancing in just a couple years from cars that would top out at 30 mph to this monster that would do 88 mph.
It was about this time that the auto was beginning to come into its own. Instead of being used mostly for racing (and killing lots of spectators and drivers in city-to-city races), people who could afford them were starting to buy cars. Racing went to closed circuits where they could run more safely.
There's so much more to say about Alan and his collection, his restorations and his huge library of reference material. Search him on YouTube and you'll find some videos of him driving the cars. You'll also find him exchanging car excitement with Jay Leno. And show up at any big car event and you may find him, perhaps wearing his leather coat and gauntlet gloves, a man who loves to bring his excitement to others.
Here are two slide shows from the event from Mike Ferring and Greg Smith.
The JCCA online magazine is now available for your reading pleasure.
