Jaguar XJS Racing Christine week 1

CHRISTINE

WEEK 1

14-21 June

Injury of the week: multiple lacerations from the broken car, but the head wound bled the most

On the garage DVD player: Whitesnake, Best of. If you've never played a propshaft as air guitar you've missed out.

Random helper of the week: depends who’s building this car really, if it’s Andrew then it’s Bear. If it’s Bear then it’s Andrew. If it’s both of us then it’s our dear old dad, who found himself trying to steer the red car as he stood peering inside it when Bear unexpectedly set off up the yard with the crane attached to the rear bumper.

That's gloomy. Megan retires from racing after a short, violent life.

It’s a pain in the neck, but it’s what we do these days, and no point hanging about, get stuck straight in.

The basis to the car is a 3.6 auto given to us by a bloke called Andrew Gawley, he runs the local Jaguar club and though originally a nice car she’d been underwater in the floods and was now scrap as a road car, a disposal problem for someone.

I didn’t exactly agree it was as scrap as that, because I wanted to run a class D-ish road car, so immediately tore out the ruined interior and boot trim, welded the bits it needed to pass an MOT, painted the interior a nice glowing white, and was actually about to put this on the road with a view to a 4 litre manual transplant after Oulton Park.

With the red car’s demise we need another XJS in a hurry. Quick examination of Megan shows a very definitely broken shell, chassis bent about a foot from the firewall, so clearly reshell time.

I’d just snaffled a bodykit off Evilbay for little money and fitted that, I was finally about to actually get ahead of the game and have a car I’d fixed that wasn’t for racing. We’d named her Cordelia, she was going to go racing one day, just not yet, it was to be a work in progress with a relaxed timetable…

…which means I had a stripped, sound road car available just as Megan dies, so the obvious thing is to take her to bits again and rebuild the red car into it.

Bit irksome that the work I’d done to take my nice V12 leather seats and trim and put them in this car is now for naught, they’re the first bits to come back out, and then it gets the full strip, right back to a bare shell in the space of a week, it’s off for blasting Monday 22^nd.

So begins the rebuild, here we go again…

Why “Christine?” It’s an evil red car that miraculously rebuilds itself, have you never seen the film?

The goal is to have the Bear out at CadwellPark in September. He likes Cadwell. Get cracking we could make Silverstone, but not really feasible unless I start feeling very energetic, and so much depends on cost, speed tends to cost money. Cadwell is achievable, with at least as sound a car as before, odds are it’ll be a good deal better. That’s gloomy for the other runners in E, sorry guys!

"Cordelia" never quite gets to see road use.

We're well-practiced strippers by now.

With the car ripped apart in record time, about 3 days, and the shell off for blasting we’ve got a day or two to assault the red car. Cage out is first priority, so take out the driver’s seat, then buzz the cage out. Unlike Angelina’s corpse the cage is under no real tension in this car, the shell wasn’t as badly mangled, so it slips out easily.

The Bear is a necessity

Same as before though, the simple act of removing the seat and cage and the car stops being a racer, it’s just a crashed, much-patched red XJS now, makes such a difference.

Next job is to harvest the precious exhaust. It’s the most valuable component on the car, and when we salvage the rear subframe we won’t want to be as brutal as we were with the road car, which merely had the clamps released and gravity allowed to do the rest. The exhaust is a no less impressive piece of work laid out on the floor. Wish I could make stuff like that.

Front end is the tricky bit, to rescue the engine means getting at it, the bodywork has been vacuum-formed round it, there are pieces like the coil protectively enveloped by big hunks of metal. Bear chains it to the truck and tows the car away with a crane, which lengthens the car back to an approximation of an XJS and lets us back in the engine bay. We do know how to do these by now, though it’s strange that we’re more gentle with the wrecked car than the road car we tore apart, but this is full of the organs we need to harvest.

Obviously there are suspect components here, coil, water pump etc, and the rad is scrap, headlights, indicators, trims, grille, oil cooler, cross bars, ignition amp, dizzy, all screwed, replacements needed for the lot, it’s minor stuff but it’s real money to replace. The bonnet was shredded, so badly broken that even Bear can’t fix it. Front wings look more like they belong a dead bird, and we threw away the front bumper, it was in so many bits Bear couldn’t begin to work out the jigsaw.

This is after we pulled the front end out.

The engine itself, miraculously, isn’t holed. Sump and cam cover intact. The solidly mounted crossmember, engine and gearbox has stopped the engine moving and damaging the drivetrain, unlike Angelina which wrecked so many of the components, but unlike Angelina we may well discover that the crossmember itself therefore took the impact, and it’s more work to swap that than to replace a bent propshaft.

Subframe released, and the car is picked off it with the crane. With the rear already on stands it’s comedy as Bear goes too far and the car rears up onto its tail like a monument to stupidity.

The Bear does his dance of celebration

With the car retrieved from the sky the rear subframe gets yanked, very easy on this, disconnect brake line, 8 bolts, done. The subframe needs no work, we check the diff oil and spanner check it, but it’s ready to go straight under the new car.

There’s ATF inside the car, which is odd, and the fuel tank has begun leaking and disgorged itself into the car. Nice.

That aside though, this is the fastest we’ve ever stripped a car, by Sunday night there’s nothing left attached and what’s left of the shell is ready for disposal. It’s very strange, things are going too well, to be prepping bits for gloss before the shell is even away for blasting is definitely a cart with a rear-mounted horse.

In preparation for a more thorough caging job we purchase a set of swaging tools, they cost the same as the pre-pressed parts we bought for the Helen job, so it’s clearly the smart move, we just need to reign in the obsession for swaging everything merely because we bought the tool or the car will look like a cheese grater.

Arrive and DIE!

We still find it a bit odd that a couple of blokes with no mechanical training or formal qualifications, with self-taught and probably-wrong skills and techniques are allowed to tear apart a car, reassemble it in a manner that is different to the way the manufacturer spent millions of pounds researching, then be allowed to race the thing at twice the legal speed limit.

We really don’t know what we’re doing, and the scrutineering process doesn’t check for mechanical competence, how is it right that this is going on? It doesn’t make a deal of logical sense. The only explanation is that no-one is really sure what they’re doing, and that this is like that horrible moment you realise as a kid that all adults are making it up as they go along and don’t really have any answers.

Are we in a paddock full of the clueless, all conspiring with each other to pretend we know what’s going on? I hate to point it out, but if we can build a car with our level of knowledge, then the Emperor is in fact naked. Try explaining to the man on the Clapham omnibus that race-winning cars can be assembled in a garage by a pair of amateurs and he’s not going to believe you.

Anyway, that's week 1 over, from one road car and one crashed race car to a stripped shell and a dismantled donor. We're already kippered, and I'm not sure we've technically started to build anything yet...