Jaguar commemorates dominance at Le Mans with extremely expensive replicas

Jaguar C-Type 70 Edition

The tribute to Jaguar’s best year at Le Mans is called the “70 Edition. The 70 Edition is a special version of the Jaguar C-Type Continuation, which Jaguar Classic unveiled early last year. The C-Type Continuation is a special project because Jaguar’s heritage department builds the cars entirely by hand. Not based on existing C-Types, but entirely “from scratch” using archival data and modern computer drawings. That way, the cars remain as faithful as possible to the original.

Jaguar Classic is building only two examples of the 70 Edition. Those are the cars you see in the photo above. The silver car – “Verbier Silver” with an interior in “Cranberry Red” – is a one-off color scheme to celebrate the platinum anniversary of the Le Mans victory. The other car is a tribute to the C-Type XKC051, the car that won the 1953 24 Hours of Le Mans. Of course, this Continuation is painted in the iconic color British Racing Green.

Not street legal

Under the hood of the C-Type is a 3.4-liter six-in-line with three Weber carburetors and an output of over 220 horsepower. Also, like the original, the Continuation has disc brakes all around. Today, of course, this is hardly special, but at the time it was the innovation that gave Jaguar hegemony at Le Mans. Unfortunately, you can’t relive those times on your way to work because the C-Type Continuation does not have type approval for public roads.

hefty price tag

Building a C-Type Continuation takes as many as 3,000 man hours in total. Therefore, the term “replica” is actually disrespectful to this project. Given the amount of work that goes into it, the price tag of more than 1.7 million euros converted hardly comes as a surprise. But dreams are always allowed, which fortunately Jaguar is helping a little with: in this configurator you can put together the C-Type Continuation of your dreams yourself!