Helen: Resurrection

JAGUAR XJS RACING

PART 12

Though Helen’s away, I helpfully left a pile of parts behind to play with. I can’t go cold turkey here, I need to do something for those ten days without the car.

The bonnet accepts extensive louvering, roughly double what we can fit with the JEC, and again this is done as a playful nod to the E type, twin lengthy rows of the things. To avoid any suggestion of a change to the car’s silhouette, they sit in the low spots of the 6 cylinder bonnet, thus not changing the side view one bit. We do think of these things. Not totally sure they are legal for the new series, because the louver panels are aluminium, which means I might be breaking the rule about original materials. Suck it and see, my way is about sixty times cheaper than having them pressed into the steel bonnet.

Making the louver panels disappear is not easy. Countersunk rivets help, but there is a lot of tickling with the angle grinder, and then a lot of time very carefully fillering, sanding, getting it wrong, and starting again. And those lovely moments of panic when fitting twin rows of anything three feet long, does that middle panel look in line with the other two?

The doors are to gain aluminium inner trim smothered in more fake carbon, and I have doors here I can make them to fit, despite the tolerance issues with old Jags they did manage to get the inside of the door roughly the same from car to car. The inner door handles are to be replaced with wire cable, swathed in blue heatshrink tubing to avoid any of the inevitable snagging of expensive gloves on rusted or frayed cable in a year’s time.

There is no question but that it’s darker inside the car now, but again, the door pull cable stands out. This contrast might not seem important, but it does serve a purpose. It probably doesn’t matter a damn, but I’ve done it. As with Vanessa the concept is a long and easy-to-grab door release that you can scrabble for when upside down and aflame. The problem is, no time to get these done as we’re right up against the deadline, the trim goes on, the handles aren’t there yet, and anytime the door closes on you, you have to phone the Bear to come and let you out again.

The car is due to go on show a week after I get her back from Zero, and another 5am trek to Kent brings me back a very expensive and shiny exhaust with a car attached.  The manifold has been made to accept power steering pipes around and about, and with it in place a few installation issues present themselves. It will be necessary now to rethink the brake pipe run, because one of them runs very close to the number 4 banana. The power steering pipes will need to be remade to suit. Not difficult, but it’s money.

She’s been asked to go to the Jaguar show at Weston Park as an example of Jaguar racing, so it is a question of getting her about done but for a few loose ends, and worrying about the rest later. Stripes to be painted, and stickers courtesy of the only other pilot ever to campaign her, Studio Signs to the rescue. I like stickers. It’s that moment you finished the Airfix Spitfire kit and went to get your saucer of warm water for the decals, you never grow out of it.

Mechanically speaking, the car isn’t done yet. Front and rear subframes are to be changed yet. But these are upgrades. They don’t have to be right now, they are improvements that we’re still working on. The super-locking diff hasn’t been tested. The triangulation hasn’t yet been perfected on the test car Vanessa, so it hasn’t been applied to Helen yet. She will be shaken down as she used to be.

In all the excitement I’d almost forgotten the boot lid. The original is still being rectified after my substantial failure with the bare metalling, and that one has now gained as much weight in paint as it lost when I sanded all the paint off, so that will stay as the heavy roadgoing class bootlid. The boot off my old V12 road car was rotten enough that it can lose some of its inner frame and get fitted to Helen for CTCRC running.

There is a certain elegance to that, given the bootlid from that first V12 bears the spoiler that got me into this racing mess in the first place, even as I’m removing the 4 bolts that attach the thing it is difficult to forget the day that I fitted it, the first time that I ever tentatively drilled a hole in my precious Jaguar. Rather different now, seconds later the step cutter ploughs seven new big holes in the skin with casual indifference. Four for the altered spoiler, three for the rain light.

The rain light itself is a high level brake light, it fits some other Jag somewhere, and was helpfully donated by Northern Chris, as he is sometimes known. Already painted and striped, it did lead the Bear to fall about laughing and call me the same string of profanities that Officer David did upon discovering I’d chromed the underbonnet brace bars. The old rain light is still fitted, but we all know that it was rubbish, and it’s probably not getting wired in again.

A flurry to finish now, as all those half-done jobs rush to catch up. The front wing gets swapped for the other one, now painted up and ready. The screen guys come back to fit another secondhand screen after they broke my last one – it simply failed suddenly across a delamination, not their fault really, but it does make this swap a free one, and free is my favourite price. It also helped that when I bought the screen, cheaply, £21 off Ebay, the bloke was so entranced by my tales of wonder from the track that he gave me a second one for free. We really do like free. The best way to carry XJS screens in an X300 is in the passenger footwell with the seat reclined. These are the real-world pieces of advice that we like to share.

The front skirt was extended downwards to skim the tarmac, and now that it’s on the car that modest 2” extra airdam looks ridiculous and breaches the ground clearance regulations for the CTCRC series. Fortunate that the bumper has to come off to be striped and meshed, as this can now be remedied.

That skirt itself has changed since the JEC days, the big round alloy ducts are, according to the book, not working properly, so I’ve reverted to the old oval ducts, correctly aligned to allow the airflow to spill into them. It is an awkward skirt in this regard, as the slope of it means you have to account for air which is canted both horizontally and vertically. Hopefully this will do the trick.

Mesh for the skirt is the same big diamond mesh as I did the grill with. Not as shiny, more functional, but I’m satisfied that you can throw rocks at it all day long and not take out my radiator or oil cooler.

The oil cooler gains some crude divergent ducting. Pointless, it strikes me after I’ve done it that it’s all very well doing a nice entry duct, but without a converging duct on the back of it, precluded by the radiator, I’ve achieved sod all. It does, however, also serve as the mount, so it’s not wholly pointless. I may have to revisit this later. I am determined to apply aero principles wherever possible, there is no reason even an old XJS cannot be made more efficient.

Headlight surrounds leap in. I never did get the intake ducts aligned to my satisfaction. Hours with the heat gun and burning hands could not quite make them sit straight, so in the end the file came out. Mountains and prophets. The protective lexan screens did have a few aborted attempts before I came up with the final pair, so she will show with plain lights in, no intakes.

One of the discarded items is tested for resilience, by beating it as hard as possible on the nearest hard surface, then a protruding bolt, to simulate an impact from incoming stones. It dents but doesn’t break. It can be folded clean in half without snapping. After some of the variable quality cheap polycarbonate we bought in the past - that must have really been Perspex due to the way it snapped - it is good to prove that I do finally have the real stuff.

That finally gives my lady her face back. Throw on the bonnet and grill, and suddenly she turns into a nice car again. All that time you spend with the front wings, bumper and bonnet missing, working on the details, and then suddenly at the end you throw these on like they are a bit of missing trim, and totally change her looks. It is a shame that the rain landed on a less than dry bonnet, that will demand a late respray on the very eve of the show.

This concept of the bodywork being a superfluous addition, that the car is the bit beneath it, is one of those step changes that takes place in your brain when we made the final commitment to building a racing car rather than a Jaguar. When you patrol the paddock at a big meeting, and there are ten Caterhams missing all their panels only an hour before the race, or that big GT car has fifty percent of the body on a stand out the back of a garage, it’s because they are working on the car, and the car is not the decorative bit on the outside. Try communicating that to a “civilian” who likes to polish the trim. I am a little embarrassed that this rebuild has spent a lot of time on the exterior, but I think it was worthwhile.

The door cards jump on, as do the mirrors. After all that song and dance and investment in cameras and screens and carbon pods, the fact that we have changed championships since the build began means a new set of rules. And the new rules are extremely specific. We like specific. So I need an actual mirror on the exterior. It says so. So bolt the originals back on. I did briefly consider bullet mirrors, but they look stupid on the XJS and they don’t work, so that isn’t really on the cards.

A flurry of screws for the interior trim, the original duck’s foot welded, ground, painted and fitted, and she’d done inside. Very sparse in here. Very dark, very functional.

Under the bonnet there is still the bespoke header tank to fit, but the resident TIG welder hasn’t done with that yet, and the new catch tank to invent. Neither matter right now, it can go with the old stuff on. A late evening on Ebay after a glass of adult pop led me unexpectedly into chav central in a search for something pretty to hold various pipes and cables. I wanted shiny P clips, but couldn’t locate them, but something small and aluminium and blue caught my eye, so with equal measures of shame and secret joy the underbonnet is treated/subjected to a small number of these devices.

Hopefully nobody else will notice. Or the fact that a few unstressed locations under here gained aluminium nuts. Well, they weigh nothing. Just nothing.

The new manifolds mean the need to keep the shiny new plug leads high and dry, so that too has to be invented. The AJ16 never had provision for this, because it didn’t have plug leads. You have to get inventive and come up with something that fits easily, comes off quickly, and doesn't look terrible. It also has to be lying about somewhere handy, and it has to be free.

Tyres would also be handy. Ebay came up with a set of 888s. If I have read the rules right, pre-83 demands a 16 x 8 rim, and at least a 50 profile tyre. 225/50/16 therefore seem about as far as I dare go without the car falling over on her own sidewalls. Expensive new, but far cheaper after someone else has bought them and changed his mind, 5 new tyres came in at £450, which makes the old R1R look really very stupid.

Off to the tame tyre place, which is so incompetent that they let the Bear do the nitrogen filling himself, meaning we get it done properly with a suitable purge. In an attempt to get half competent, the tyre pen comes out to mark orientation, compound, and position on the car. That I also secretly like writing on the tyres is just a bonus.

With the car nearly there now, it's time for Dean and his stickers, and the nervous moment when we pull the trigger on the white paint spray.....

Part XIII coming soon.

Shareonimo

Loaded for transport, and looking almost as if we meant it.

Bedding down with Mr Zero for the week. About to be rid of her roadgoing class background....

A woman at these services asked me if she was heading the right way for the airport. Asking her where I am is apparently not the right answer.

It's not looking all that bad under here now.

Clever design allows for gearbox swap without dropping the full system.

Check out the primaries on that.

Too shiny and new, but one track session and they'll go that lovely golden colour.

Deliberately kept on the right side of boy racer drainpipe. The effect is quite subtle.

Holy bonnets Batman.

Louvering prep gets under way. Takes bloody ages too.

Making the louver panels disappear takes forever.

When you modify everything, it all takes a lot of time.

But the end result is acceptable.

Not perfect by a long shot, still well rippled, but close enough for the local council.

The telltale shiny spots of reappearing dents.

Took it off, put another one on. What luxury.

New rainlight is the first part of the car to have the stripes applied. Mostly as a test piece to see if I can spray them on neatly.

Crude oil cooler ducting, and the foolish additional airdam that quite plainly doesn't work. Back to the drawing board.

Fluctuating between embarrassment that I fitted alloy hose clamps, and joy that I actually produced something neat.

Goodbye screwed R1Rs.

Hello new 888s.

225/50/16s. Biggest I think I can fit for the pre-83 series.