Jaguar Lightweight E-Type 2014

(from Jaguar Press Release) Jaguar has revealed the prototype of its 'new' Lightweight E-type - a further six of which will be built and sold.
Jaguar announced in May 2014 that it would recreate six new Lightweights, each built by Jaguar Heritage, part of Jaguar Land Rover's new Special Operations division.

Each of the six cars will be built to a specification originated from the last Lightweight E-type produced in 1964 and will be hand-crafted at the original home of the E-type, Jaguar's Browns Lane plant in Coventry, England. The cars will be sold as period competition vehicles and all will be suitable for FIA homologation for historic motorsport purposes.

The new cars are the 'missing' six vehicles from the 'Special GT E-type' project, which originally started in February 1963 with the objective of building 18 cars. Only 12 of the aluminium-bodied Lightweight E-types were eventually built and the remaining six designated chassis numbers having lain dormant, until now. The six new cars will carry those original, historic Lightweight E-type chassis numbers.

A race winner in the hands of a variety of famous drivers during its short competitive career, the car has achieved worldwide fame and original examples are now valued in the many millions. In recreating the Lightweight E-type, Jaguar Heritage has been able to call on the superlative skills and experience of many talented engineers and technicians already working in a variety of departments within Jaguar.

All, when offered the chance to assist with this unique project, leapt at the opportunity. Some even have an indirect link with the E-type when it was new: one master technician calculated that his family - including his grandparents, his father and his uncle - had a collective 170 years' service at Jaguar stretching back to the early 1960s.

The expertise and attention brought to bear on this recreation project is staggering, with the full resources of Jaguar being applied to ensure that the six new Lightweights will not only be authentic, but will also be built to the highest quality standards.

So the six chosen customers will each receive the rarest of things - a brand new Lightweight E-type, hand-built at Browns Lane and just as desirable as one of the originals.

The bodyshell

The core component of the Lightweight E-type is its aluminium bodyshell. This material replaced the steel of the production E-type in the quest to shed weight - some 250lb (114kg) were saved compared with the standard car.

Despite the 50-year gap, the aluminium build of the six new Lightweights gives them an immediate affinity with the current Jaguar range, the F-TYPE and XJ models being built to exacting standards with aluminium bodies for exactly the same reason. In fact, Jaguar is now the world's leading manufacturer of aluminium-bodied cars and the company has unrivalled experience in the relatively new field of applying aluminium technology to volume production cars.

So when tasked with the job of recreating the Lightweight E-type's aluminium body, today's Jaguar engineers could relate at once to what their predecessors had achieved 50 years before. However, despite the enormous advances in technology since the early 1960s, the decision was taken not to incorporate modern materials or fixing methods. While high-strength aluminium alloys and bonded structures would have been invisible, they would not have been true to the original design - and nor would they have conformed to the FIA's homologation requirements for historic racing.

Instead, today's advanced technology was deployed to ensure the highest quality and most faithful rendition of the Lightweight E-type's open two-seater body components. Using state-of-the-art scanning technology, the inner and outer surfaces of a Lightweight bodyshell were digitally mapped.

The resulting massively detailed scan, which recorded dimensions and shape down to a fraction of a millimetre, was then assessed by Jaguar's technicians to validate how the body was assembled back in the 1960s, how consistent the structure was side-to-side, and how it could be engineered today to produce the highest quality result for the Lightweight E-type project.

As this digital capturing process gave Jaguar's engineers complete control over the Lightweight E-type body's 230 individual components, their shapes could then be optimised before the data was sent to the tool room at Jaguar's Whitley engineering centre. Even panels which are unseen within the structure have been faithfully reproduced. To ensure absolute symmetry, one side of the scanned body was used as the datum, this being 'flipped' to produce an identical condition on the opposite side.

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