Shelsley Walsh celebrates 60 years of the Jaguar E-type

Famed hillclimb Shelsley Walsh in Worcestershire will reverberate to Jaguar’s legendary six-cylinder XK snarl as hundreds of E-types assemble on the weekend of June 12/13 to celebrate 60 years of a motoring legend and the groovy era it symbolised. There’s a very special link with Motor Sport magazine too.

Revealed to a gaping public in June 1961, the E-type instantly outperformed, underpriced and out-styled everything else in the market, becoming the cool car everyone wanted. And six decades on, they still do. Combining 1960s fashion, music and dancing the weekend harks back to Swinging London, but it’s the cars which star.

Motor Sport readers can win two free tickets to this event and a ride up the hill in the Italian Job E-type. For more details about how to enter, visit: motorsportmagazine.com/etype60

Oldest of all present is 9600 HP, the original press car, plus the E-type from The Italian Job and examples of every model up to the last V12, but Motor Sport readers will want to inspect the red coupé with the registration FPL 660C. That is the car which for five years carried Denis Jenkinson, our inimitable Continental Correspondent, to and from over 100 grands prix and sports car races across Europe, from the Isle of Man to Austria’s Grossglockner hillclimb and down to Sicily for the Targa Florio. His various reports chronicled all these trips and his steady admiration for the long-legged vehicle which never let him down, and which he replaced with another E, this time a convertible.

Though now converted to right-hand drive, Jenks ordered the coupé with a lefthand wheel as it would spend most of its life on the continent, plus lowercompression pistons since fuel abroad in the 1960s could be suspect, and he selected a high axle ratio for his long high-speed journeys. The sight of the red E-type ina circuit paddock was a sign that DSJ was somewhere in the pits quizzing drivers, principals and mechanics for every detail of cars and teams.

He rarely returned to the UK but moved from race to race with the GP circus, diverting constantly to visit car builders, race teams and private collections in order to cram his monthly Letter from Europe with insights.

In between the hillclimb runs, evening parties, vinyl disco and cocktail bars, take a moment to admire the mount that most of you will have read about in these pages.

The UK’s premier E-type 60^th anniversary event is organised by the E-type Club. The event will take place at Shelsley Walsh Hillclimb on 12-13 June. Advance tickets from £22 or £25 on the gate. For more information visit etype60.com