Scary to sublime: the best Jaguars to drive at Festival of Speed | Frankel’s Insight

As this is the year in which the proud Coventry manufacturer relaunched itself upon the world with that advertisement and a generally well-received concept car, I thought it timely to share a few memories of the best, and just one of what was undoubtedly the worst cars I’ve driven up the Hill.

What I’ve learned about driving at the Festival of Speed, apart from where to appear to be being brave and where to make sure you’re letting discretion be the better part of valour, is that the perfect car requires a subtle balance of abilities, neither too fast nor too slow.

Size (or lack thereof) matters more than pure grip and a car set up to be far more soft than you’d ever want on a dry race track is going to feel a whole lot nicer and easier to drive than one designed to maintain its ride height regardless of the forces put through it.

So, you’d have to go a very long way indeed before finding something more pleasurable than a C-type Jaguar. It’s more than quick enough to mandate your undivided attention but comfortable for all bar the very tallest. You can see the extremities very clearly – important when there’s a flint wall to miss – and in that lovely, loping straight-six engine so much torque is beautifully delivered you could get from bottom to top in just two gears and not be unduly inconvenienced. And that inherent softness is there, too, at least if set up as Jaguar originally intended.

But it’s almost too easy. I actually want a bit of a challenge, something to keep me ever so slightly on my toes, and for that an upgrade to a D-type will do nicely.

The thing about the D-type is that it was Jaguar’s first pure racing car, rather than something related, however distantly, to a street machine. It was designed for one purpose alone and going up the Duke of Richmond’s drive was not it. This is a Le Mans car, from its elegant nose to the tip of its vertical tail. Technically, it’s actually not as good as the ‘C’ on the hill, the limitations of its live axle rear suspension far more in evidence with the kind of power the works 3.8-litre engines were capable of producing.

Where car stops and wall starts is harder to see, too, and to get the most out of it you have to throw it at the Hill because it doesn’t want to drift naturally in the same way as either the ‘C’ or its slower but far sweeter rival, the Aston Martin DB3S.

A racing E-type is a very different proposition, especially when it’s Bob Tullius’ V12 roadster. I think of all the cars I’ve driven at Goodwood, this is the one with the greatest disparity between its bark and bite. Fire it up in the paddock and people tend to run for cover; they look at you as if you’re some kind of superhero about to tackle some unconquerable supernatural force. In reality, it’s a pussycat. Quick, but controllable, super light to handle thanks to power steering and without a single malevolent bone in its body.

I’ve driven the XJ13 one-off stillborn Le Mans car a few times, too, but feel unqualified to make a proper judgement because it’s so rare and almost all the original bits that exist are on the car, so if you break one you are, in a very real sense, destroying history. So, I’ve always just ambled up, soaking up the sound of that unique 5-litre quad-cam racing V12 motor and simply enjoyed the privilege of being on board.

Not so with the European Touring Car Championship-winning XJS, which is an absolute monster of a machine and requires you to drive it that way. It’s a wrestling match from first to last, and when that V12 comes on song a fairly wild ride, too, but great fun and with the sense that, despite all the blood and thunder, it’s not actually trying to find the shortest route to the nearest hay bale. Sometimes you just get a sense with a car that, for all its apparent ferocity, it’s still on your side.

Or not, as was the case with that worst ever Goodwood Jaguar, the Broadspeed XJ12 coupé. Now, to be fair, it was not in the best of health when I drove it and you’d probably not react well to being wrenched from your sick bed and forced to perform upon a very public stage, so perhaps certain allowances need to be made. And that it was still wearing the same slick tyres with which it crossed the line at the end of its last race in the 1970s. Did I mention it was raining?

It was one of those runs you’re just grateful to complete in one piece. One moment the car is chugging off the line with all the conviction of an overloaded pizza delivery bike, anything from three to seven cylinders firing at any given moment, then suddenly all twelve come chiming in without the slightest warning and you’re sideways across the track in a straight line, instantly in full survival mode. This is some distance from my idea of a great time when mounted upon someone else’s slavering tiger.

Which leaves the 1988 Le Mans winning Group C Jaguar XJR-9LM. Anyone who has seen Justin Law driving a similar car at immense speed up the Hill will know just how fast one of these things can be made to go when driven by someone highly skilled and intimately familiar with them, but Jaguar’s car is a museum piece and needs to be treated as such.

These cars are always difficult, designed as they are for an environment about as different to the Goodwood Hill as can be imagined. They get hot very quickly, can’t turn around at the bottom of the Hill to reach the start and have awkward gearboxes and cramped cabins. Unlike the rival Porsche 962C, which was always intended to be managed by wealthy amateur customers, the Jags are designed for professional racing drivers alone.

But once you’re waved away and fired towards turn one like an artillery shell, V12 thrashing away behind you, there’s few places I’d rather be. These are not easy cars to drive, particularly because they have effectively solid ‘spool’ type differentials which make the car want to go straight on in slow corners. And this effect is exacerbated by the fact you’re on stone cold slicks — you can put a bit of heat into the surface of the rears by spinning them up as you leave the time, but there’s nothing you can do about the fronts.

So great care must be taken, at least until you’re through Molecomb and the Hill starts to open out. Then, in the quicker corners towards the top you can let the V12 do its thing, feel the downforce come to your aid, and by the time you’re out of the flat left at the top you feel you’re flying. Just in time to take the flag and the run to be over.

Which would I take for one more run? It should be the XJS, because it would provide the wildest (for a good reason) ride I’ve ever had in a Jaguar up the Goodwood Hill.

But really, it’d be the XJR-9LM, for what it is, what it did and the fact I was there when it did it. When I watched it win Le Mans in 1988 — my first ever visit to the iconic race — I never dreamed I’d even see the car again, let alone get to drive it on numerous occasions, both at Goodwood and elsewhere. It reminds me just how lucky I’ve been.

The 2025 Festival of Speed takes place on 10^th-13^th July. Thursday tickets are now limited. A small batch of extra tickets for Friday–Sunday have just been released, exclusively for members of the GRRC.

Main image photography by Jayson Fong.