Jaguar’s racing record is one of the grandest in motorsport. Its road cars are what is left of it, and keeping them running is a sport of its own.
Jaguar and endurance racing go together like Monaco and overtaking complaints. The C-type and D-type took five Le Mans victories in the 1950s, and the XJR-9 and XJR-12 added two more in 1988 and 1990.
Then came Formula 1, which was less glorious. Ford took over the Stewart team and relaunched it as Jaguar Racing for 2000, but it never won a grand prix and was sold to Red Bull at the end of 2004. Readers of this site may have noticed the team has done rather better since.
Stewart, incidentally, is the same team Mastercard once fretted over, as we noted in our report on McLaren’s Mastercard deal.
Trophies sit in cabinets. Road cars sit in garages, and Jaguars have rarely been shy about giving their owners something to do in them.
The donor car
If you have ever owned a Jaguar, you will know the marque’s reputation for electrical gremlins, tired rubbers and leaky cooling systems is well earned. Owners tend to love the cars anyway, and that affection is probably why one of the trade’s most unlikely success stories exists.
In the late 1970s, Hazel and Stephen Barratt were mending their own E-type in rural Shropshire. They used a second car as a donor, and once they had taken the parts they needed, they sold the rest. The phone, as the company tells it, never stopped ringing.
The couple began by buying in old E-type stock to sell on, then moved to remanufacturing parts Jaguar no longer made. Not every early product was perfect, and the company says so.
Gremlins, meet Lucas
The 1990s brought a purchase that suited a marque whose electrics are often temperamental. SNG Barratt bought Sovy UK, an original supplier of electrical components to Jaguar, Aston Martin and other British manufacturers. It later added original Lucas assembly lines, which let it remake switches, washer bottles and lamps that had been obsolete for years.
Today, from Bridgnorth, the company describes itself as the world’s largest independent manufacturer and supplier of Jaguar parts. Its UK branch is an authorised Jaguar Parts Dealership, which puts genuine parts alongside its own remanufactured range. Its processes are compliant with ISO 9001 quality standards.
If you run an XJ, SNG Barratt’s range of Jaguar XJ parts draws on genuine, remanufactured and own-made stock.
The longer race
Seven Le Mans wins made Jaguar’s name, but it is the owners who keep it running, and they can usually only do that while somebody still makes the parts. If you own one, you are running the longer race, and SNG Barratt is the pit crew.
