VANESSA – Development.

The test run at Brands Hatch had shown some potential, the car worked far better than I could have hoped.

What she now needs is readying for battle, because she came away from there with a customer already – Matt Skelton. This gives a bit of a problem, because we actually rate Matt, any flaws in the car that I’ve noted, he’ll find, so it has to be bang on when he takes her out.

She gets weighed as soon as she gets back, and the numbers are good. We don't understand, Frankenvanessa has been seriously repaired, and we've built her to take a lot of potential punishment. Why is she light? It makes no sense. It does reinforce our suspicions that the very bodyshells vary in weight.

First port of call is to actually finish her. A lot of her cosmetics were merely attached, rather than finished, so when she returns from Brands she actually loses a few of the parts she is wearing. Windows, for example. Bonnet, boot, bumper.

The windows are finished carefully, slowly sanding them to fit perfectly, and then the long job of attaching them properly to the car using rivnuts and little button head bolts. 50 of them.

The finished article is quite nice, I have to say, they sit on the car much better now, and the sleek look does update the car somewhat.

We’re sticking with the no-mirrors concept. It’s worth a try, the absence of them does completely change the car’s look, and I love any tweak that reduces drag by any margin.

Water pump is changed for a non-leaking item, which is hardly a chore, but other than that she appears to have largely withstood the onslaught, mechanically speaking, under the bonnet.

The rear end is not so great. Without radius arms for the test, we had to improvise the rear anti roll bar attachment, and it doesn’t seem to have worked so well. The droplinks are both bent. The subframe has broken some of the welds on its solid mounts, because it wasn’t anchored in any other way, the torque reaction of even stock power on old T1Rs was enough to twist it free.

A few changes needed in here then. We tackle this with customary overkill. The diff tie plate is already in our customary 6mm plate, and ready drilled for bits to bolt to it. Brace bars to more solidly anchor it to the car are swiftly constructed. Additional bracing to the bodyshell for the attachment points is added, and once all in place, the solid mounts re-welded.

Bear completely redesigns the anti roll bar linkages, which now go to a different place, attach in a different way, and bolt on to something new and exciting that we’re not explaining to you because it’s our design and we’re not bragging about it til we know it works and doesn’t break.

Sadly for me, all the rose joints and their paraphernalia do cost money, but McGill motorsports – link – are an excellent source of cheaper goods of this ilk. Ilk, not elk.

A look round the front end reveals something shocking. One of the front dampers doesn’t appear to have ever been bolted to the bottom arms. That Brands test was without any nearside front damper control. It makes some of the wild rear perhaps understandable, and it causes some red faces at our end. 24 hour shifts lead to mistakes.

Inside the car we need to rid her of some of the sharper bits, and the passenger side door handle could do with, you know, working.

The catch is swapped for a less sticky one, and a stronger return spring makes that a particularly purposeful door handle – having had a door come open on me I have got a bit picky about making sure they latch well.

The car is now to get a proper trial by fire, battle testing at Oulton Park with me at the wheel. Test day is one thing, but the abuse of race day tells you much about how a car is going to behave as a racer rather than a laptime queen.

Cosmetics are on the cards now too. The interior gains fake carbon fibre effect AMS plastic door cards. Easy to cut, form, bend and drill, rivnuts in the door allow for another ring of shiny bolts to affix them to the door.

We are keeping the crude wire rope interior door handle, it is simple and extremely effective. If you were upside down in the car, on fire, and you want to get out, would you rather fumble, blind, for the Jaguar release, or a cable that runs over 2 feet along the door card? Morbid to think in these terms, but it should always be a question you ask when modifying anything. It's not pretty, but it's very effective.

A few minor changes to the interior trim too, the extinguisher handle is re-sited to a better location, and the gearbox tunnel cover better affixed. A finishing piece of trim creates the illusion that the dash and centre console are all there.

Externally there is some minor finishing of a few bits of paint that went awry, the door/front offside wing were interfering with each other and have to be redressed and touched up, and a thin coat on a rear buttress is resprayed.

It’s then time for the stripes, which were always planned from the start. For this car we’re spraying them on for the first time. Having practiced on another job we think we can make a decent enough job of painting them on, which avoids the slightly dull look you get with vinyl, and the risk of it peeling off after a few races.

Marking out and masking up a car for twin parallel stripes takes forever. It is so hard to get it right, because Jaguar didn’t, for some reason, mark their cars out with handy reference points in the middle of panels. The results are pleasing, if a little more dramatic than we’d planned.

David hates it. We have to go so far as to consult with the car’s namesake, and get no sensible answer other than that the colour pink should be involved somehow. Sigh.

Black pinstripe edging tones it down a little, the idea comes from an E type on the cover of the latest MSA magazine. We do pay some attention to such things.

A big change on the exhaust. A bespoke tubular exhaust manifold and system adds cost, but also a lot more go. Borrowed for now from her sister car, we’ll be duplicating and fitting one later to give us those central exhaust cannons.

The fuel tank setup is finally done, a hole in the bootlid and the periscope filler neck now means that once scrutineered we don’t need the boot off all weekend.

Despite the time we have to play, the finishing takes a lot of time, and with other projects taking priority, like other cars we’re looking after who’ve collected a lot of battle damage, and an XJ40 that needs attention, poor Vanessa is bottom of the list. She is finally finished at 4am on test day, once again the truck driver is sent to bed whilst the test pilot works into the dawn chorus. It’s not our normal way of working, but we have so much on at this point that there are insufficient hours to work to a sensible time.

Vanessa rolls off the truck a little after 9am to commence OultonPark testing. She is still running the old brakes and pads from Brands, she might be racing this weekend, but she’s still really under test, this is a shakedown of all the mods ready for the real work at Cadwell with Matt Skelton in a couple of weeks.

Testing is great fun, but it does demonstrate that the car is sensitive to the rubber she wears. I have become incredibly touchy about grip in the cars I’m driving, I don’t know what happened to me, but I’ve gone completely against the Kutuka ethos that tyre tread is optional, I can now feel the level of rubber on the tyre as if you’d driven over me with it.

I suspect mostly this is because this car is so communicative. Unlike Christine this car gives tremendous feedback without feeling harsh. Something somewhere in the drivetrain is simply smoother, the feeling of being stuffed in a metal bin and beaten with sticks isn’t here. That does warrant analysis, because it’s a better car in this respect.

The car is better today, it likes this track in a hurry, even on the very thin R1Rs she’s wearing and the ridiculously heavy wheels. It’s straight into the fastest lap times I’ve ever done here.

The full account of today’s test is here but the eventual conclusion was that the rear end is still too stiff, the incredible rear grip that gives such confidence to nail the throttle halfway through a corner is still absent. I maintain it’s what I need to really get the apex speed I like to carry, I continue to believe that corner exit speed is more important than any other trait. It’s better, but not quite there yet, the feeling of a light rear end is still present. Further tweaks needed for Cadwell, but we’re definitely moving in the right direction now.

Oulton saw the car get numbers and livery, she proudly, if briefly, sported the number 1, which on a personal note is my only outing with the series bearing my 2010 championship hangover. Her eventual race result, easily the class E winner, and 2^nd XJS home – more my fault for messing up the start than hers – was encouraging, but confirmed my feeling about the rear end. Being such a delicate flower, if I don’t trust the rear end I’m just useless.

Post Oulton we did indeed carry out some further modification. We changed rear springs, the dampers got another twiddle, and a few running repairs as the car finally got new drilled brake discs. Customer always gets the best stuff.

We also tried her on the cheapest pads I’ve ever bought, Ebay coughed up a set of rear X300 pads for £3. Really. They turned out to be too good, we ended up cutting slots in them to reduce pad area at Cadwell. So much for cheap meaning rubbish then! The pads and discs were the first cash we spent on the brakes though, up to this point the consumables - discs and pads - bill was zero. Oh yes.

On a less major note, we decide that having nearly destroyed three cars in testing, and having missed major collision with Gail only by sixth sense, it's time to fit mirrors.

A new dash instrument pod replaces the broken old one, not that this one seems to work a great deal better, but the rev counter seems to work, and that's helpful.

The windows also got tinted after Oulton, our pet Dean did us a superb job at short notice. They looked truly superb, but we got nervous about just how dark the side windows looked, seeing the driver was a bit touch and go, so we panicked and ripped it off again. The brief moment with it done though, the car looked properly evil. We’ll have to revisit that at a later date, it’s the future!

Vanessa presented to Cadwell then as a finished car, she is at that point as I would choose to race her, if I were to do so. The setup, the handling, was as good as anything I’ve ever turned out in. At that I’m calling her finished.

That Matt went out and won the race in her immediately suggests we got something right...