Frankenstein XK found a home in Canada

by Bill Buys

THERE was a lot of interest in the 1950 running of the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

It was the was the Le Mans debut for Jaguar’s XK 120 sports cars and the first arrival of an American competitor in Briggs Cunningham, who had entered two Cadillac Spiders, one called Clumsy Pup and the other Le Monstre.

The Jags, all run by privateers, had been factory-prepped and two of them finished the race, in 12th and 15 places, while the third retired after 23 hours with clutch trouble.

Jaguar was expected to be back the following year – and so it was, with a trio of its famed C-Types. But Jag chief William Lyons hedged his bets by building three special XK 120s in case the advanced C-Types weren’t quite ready for the demanding enduro.

They were called the lightweight cars, LT for short, each with a magnesium alloy body.

Well, the C-Types were ready and the one driven by the two Peters – Walker and Whitehead – gave the marque its first win.

The second one, piloted by Lawrie and Waller, ran 11th and the one driven by Stirling Moss and Jack Fairman retired with oil pressure woes after 92 laps.

The three ‘special’ XK 120s would go on to race only later, one of them coming to be known as the fastest XK 120 of them all.

Brendan McAleer, of Hagerty, says had you have been living in Vancouver, Canada, in the 1960s or ’70s, you might have spotted the first of these special cars, either sitting exposed to the elements in an open carport on Southwest Marine Drive or just puttering off to get groceries -- its owner seemingly unaware that he was driving a race-bred special worth perhaps seven figures.

The three lightweight XK 120s were known as LT1, LT2, and LT3, but only the latter two were properly completed by the factory.

Two of them, LT2 and LT3, simply sat around for a while before passing into the hands of Charles Hornburg Jr of Los Angeles, who was the first to import Jaguars into the US and he had a special relationship with the company.

Hornburg styled these two special as XK 120 “Silverstones,” a term not actually approved by Jaguar.

A young Phil Hill raced LT3 to a podium finish at Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin, in 1951, and LT2 would go on to have an extensive racing career after Hornburg had finished with it.

Any XK 120 is a valuable machine, the rare lightweight three exceptionally so.

Last year, the unrestored LT3 sold at the Amelia Island auctions in Florida for AU $1.2 million.

However, LT1 is most interesting for its roller-coaster life story.

In 1951, a young Cambridge student named Bob Berry wrote to Jaguar’s service manager and race manager, Frank “Lofty” England, with a bit of a Hail Mary request.

That summer, Berry would be in France for a university program. His mother was French, and thus he was fluent in the language. Would an extra pair of hands be of use to Jaguar?

Somewhat to young Berry’s astonishment, Lofty wrote back to say that Berry should drop by Coventry.

Berry apparently impressed the Jaguar team; a short while later, he was on the front lines at Le Mans, supporting Jaguar’s historic first win at the French enduro.

Berry’s stint with Jaguar ended up being an extended job interview.

He subsequently left Cambridge and went to work at the company, where he was employed until he reached retirement age.

He was also an amateur driver of considerable ability, a reputation that began with LT1.

As an uncompleted car, overshadowed by the C-Type, it might have simply been scrapped, but Berry took its lightweight body and matched it with the chassis of his 1952 XK 120.

The work was done outside of the factory by an ex-Jaguar mechanic and included the installation of a 3.8-litre engine from a D-Type and four-wheel disc brakes.

By the mid-1950s, the alloy-bodied Frankenstein was considered the fastest XK 120 in England, if not the world.

Weighing about 20 per cent less than a standard XK 120, each of the three LT cars would have been extremely quick by the standard of the day.

The uprated engine of LT1 made it just about capable of catching C-Types, and Berry managed to get himself onto the podium at least once, at Goodwood.

He had a varied amateur racing career until Sir William told Berry that he could either race or work at Jaguar, not both.

He eventually worked his way up to executive level with Jaguar, retired, and lived into his early nineties.

LT1, meanwhile, passed into the hands of a Jaguar specialist named David Cottingham.

In 1966, through the classified ads in the back of Road & Track magazine, Cottingham advertised this special lightweight XK 120.

A call came from the west coast of Canada.

Bill Mackin belonged to one of the oldest timber families in British Columbia, and his parents had made their fortune logging the forests of Canada’s west coast.

Mackin bought XK 120 LT1 in 1966, and he frequently drove it on the street.

LT1 acquired the usual scuffs and dents of regular usage, but no one thought that odd -- in the 1960s and 1970s, a 10-to-15-year-old Jaguar was merely a used car.

Mackin did have the car refreshed by a local Jaguar specialist named Ed Arnold, and one day he turned up at the Westwood racing track.

Westwood, now just a silhouette buried beneath subdivisions, was then a 1.8-mile road course, completed in 1959, Canada’s first purpose-built racing circuit.

Peter Price, a local mechanic and racer whose shop served as a sort of unofficial clubhouse, found himself without a ride when his Allard suffered a mechanical issue.

Mackin either suggested or agreed to the idea that Price would drive LT1 in the race.

After a quick fix to satisfy some meagre safety requirements (LT1 did not have seatbelts, so holes were punched out with a screwdriver and a lap belt fitted), Price roared off and won the race.

The win kicked off about five years of a further racing career for the LT1, with Price at the wheel everywhere from Portland International in Oregon to California’s Laguna Seca.

Price was adept at getting the most out of the car, which by this point was breathing through triple Webers and making about 225kW.

David Birchall, a former Westwood vintage racer with his own interesting collection of vintage English machinery, worked on LT1 in those days, and remembers how well the car did.

“It was a very quick car,” he said.

“Peter was a big guy, very competent behind the wheel. I remember him beating an Aston DB4 GT at Portland, and the driver of the Aston complaining about LT1’s disc brake advantage.

Peter pointed out that ‘this car had four-wheel disc brakes before your car was even built!’”

Another time, Birchall says, saw Price and the LT1 battling a Corvette and a 300SL Gullwing at Laguna Seca.

It was a Mercedes-backed event, and the Gullwing was a bit of a ringer, an alloy-bodied car with triple US sports car champion Paul O’Shea at the wheel.

Even with the racing close to the point of occasional body contact, Price and the LT1 edged out the 300SL, losing to the Corvette only because it had a later 327-cubic-inch V8 engine installed.

At the beginning of the 1980s, Price moved his shop to Portland and LT1 would race no more.

Mackin still drove the car occasionally, but for the most part, it sat outside his house, visible from the street in an open carport.

From time to time, a buyer would come along and make a six-figure offer, but Mackin routinely turned them away.

But toward the end of the 1980s, during a spike in early Jaguar prices, someone is said to have offered Mackin seven figures.

This finally spurred him to action, but LT1 was due for some mechanical freshening.

Rob Fram is the mechanic at RX Autoworks, a restoration shop that can boast concours wins from Pebble Beach to Villa D’Este, but in the late 1980s he was an apprentice in his twenties working at XJ Motors in Vancouver.

He remembers the sight of LT1 rolling through the doors of the shop, and the feeling of being handed its keys.

“I’ll never forget the smell of old fuel burning off,” he said.

“I always remember that drive any time I get that whiff of old gas. It had these old Pirellis on it, and they just spun when you hit the throttle.”

Later, while driving a restored Alfa Romeo 8C, Fram ended up following LT2 and LT3 on the Pebble Beach tour.

“It was pretty special to have seen all three of them in person.”

Shortly after the car was fixed up in 1989, Mackin sold the LT1 back to Cottingham, and off it disappeared back to the UK.

It’s not clear where the car eventually ended up, though there are some hints it landed in Japan.

For all those who remember LT1 for its exploits at Goodwood and Laguna Seca, residents of Vancouver will remember this part of Jaguar’s history as a fixture of their daily commute.

For years, what was once the fastest XK 120 in the world was not tucked away in a museum, but out in the real world, telling its story to anyone who would listen.