1984 TWR XJ-S European Touring Car Championship Winner
Jaguar Daimler Heritage Trust have always been keen to support Coventry Motofest and are happy for its return in full following the gap caused by COVID and the Queen’s Jubilee. This year we are planning to take 5 of the cars from our Collection.
Motofest is a motoring festival unlike any other in England, based in Coventry, UK providing a unique blend of motorsport demonstrations, static displays, live music and anything else with a connection to Coventry and transport. Motofest gives us the opportunity to properly test out some of our racing cars as we cannot use all of them on the public highway and this year we will be demonstrating our TWR XJS and our 1956 D-type which raced at Le Mans.
1990 Jaguar Turbo Charged XJS 4X4
These will be accompanied by three other XJSes, our Police XJS Demonstrator, recently re-commissioned in Metropolitan Police colours, our experimental 4×4 turbo-charged XJS from 1990 and another experimental XJS owned by a good friend of the Trust, from Norway, which has just been re-commissioned locally and this will be the first time the two cars have been together since the early 1990s.
Our last car has a completely different theme HM The Queen’s Daimler Super V8 saloon from 2002, continuing the long tradition of the Daimler company supplying to the Royal Household since the early 1900s.
The Trust cars will be lined up at the end of Warwick Road opposite the ‘Paddock’ (new for this year).
Although with modern cars you press the start button, put it in gear and off you go, but this is not the case with our racing cars. We have to run them for about 10 minutes to bring the oil and engine coolant up to a proper temperature. So if you want to get up close and personal when we fire them up come over about 15 minutes before our scheduled start time. Just a note of caution – if you have small children, they may find it VERY noisy.
With the support of Coventry City Council, Motofest closes half of Coventry Ring Road which is then under the control of MSA Marhalls and used for timed competition runs, interspersed with demonstration sessions.
The Trust will not allow our cars to be used for the timed competitions but we take the opportunity of the demonstration sessions to use some of our historic race cars on the public highway, using them as intended and putting on a great spectacle for the thousands of visitors who flock to the city over Motofest weekend.