Jaguar won the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1951 and 1953 with its C-type, which was little more than a race-prepped riff on the roadgoing XK120. In 1954, Jag decided to shoot for the moon with the asymmetrically finned, elongated flying saucer known as the D-type, a visually distinctive little bullet that spawned the roadgoing XKSS and took home three straight trophies at the Circuit de la Sarthe, winning the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1955, ?56, and ?57. When one comes up for sale, rich dudes of a certain Anglophile persuasion invariably open their wallets. Guess what" One?s for sale, and its lineage features a couple of notable owners during the first couple of decades of its life, both of whom were notoriously ruthless businessmen in very different fields. In 1955, after the car?s initial on-track success, Jaguar decided to build a short production run of D-types to sell to privateer racers. Fifty-one were built, and the cars were generally very close in configuration, wearing short-nose bodywork and breathing through Weber carbs.
When this particular D-type was first offered for sale, Manchester dealer Henlys had a hard time unloading it, ultimately passing it on to a young racer by the name of Bernard Ecclestone, who later went on to buy the Brabham Formula 1 team. We sort of lost track of him after that. Ecclestone sold the car to a privateer by the name of Peter Blond in 1956 for the tidy sum of 3500 pounds. Blond raced the car a bit, and then it passed through a series...