Five reasons you’d pay £14m for this Jaguar XKSS…

Yes, we understand that £14m is an exceptionally large sum of money. You could buy a house in London for that – maybe even one that’s not on a main road, under a flight path or with a rooftop full of Shoreditch hipsters. You might even be able to afford a New York apartment that doesn’t have live rats in it. But it’s unlikely that either will bring you quite as much joy (and jealous longing) as this 1957 Jaguar XKSS.

So why exactly are we so excited about a 60-year-old Jag? Let us count the ways. 

Photos: Gooding & Company / Brian Henniker

Let’s kick off with the fact that the XKSS is a literal road-going race car. It’s basically a reshaped D-Type, which is one of the most formidable race cars ever produced by Jaguar. 

We realise that’s a pretty big call, so let’s qualify it: Jaguar won the 24 Hours of Le Mans three years on the trot, in 1955, 1956 and 1957. That makes it more successful than the C-Type, which won twice, in 1951 and 1953. 

It’s fair to say, then, that Jaguar was on peak form in the 1950s, even with serious competition from Porsche, Ferrari, Lancia and Mercedes-Benz, among others. 

Part of what made Jaguar the team to beat was the XK6 engine. And what an engine. In various forms and with varying displacements, this was the power behind some of Jaguar’s best road and race cars for nearly five decades, including the C-Type, D-Type, E-Type, S-Type, Mark 1, Mark 2, XK120, XK140, XK150… you get the idea. 

The straight-six configuration made it wonderfully balanced, the long stroke made it torquey and the tall, twin-cam head was aluminium, which made it light. In the XKSS, it was essentially the same 3.4-litre engine as the Le Mans-winning D-Type, which was good for more than 250bhp.

And, combined with the exceptionally slippery bodywork, was more than enough to take Jaguar to consecutive victories in one of the fiercest and most dangerous eras of endurance racing. The lightweight aluminium monocoque – exceptionally advanced for the time – was shaped to be as aerodynamic as possible. And it worked – the D-Type was more than 10mph faster down the Mulsanne Straight than the Ferrari 250 GTO. 

Yes, the flowing lines are there for function, but the form they create is something else entirely. If we were the kind of people you find at the Tate on a Saturday, we’d say that the design language was an instrumental influence on future Jaguars, including the epochal E-Type. Or, in regular English, that the gorgeous flowing lines of the D-Type and XKSS were so good that they influenced perhaps the most famous Jag of all time. 

But unlike the E-Type, the XKSS is painfully rare. The story goes that when Jaguar decided to pull out of racing to focus on road cars, 25 D-Type chassis were still sitting in Jag’s factory on Browns Lane. Unfortunately, a fire broke out almost exactly 60 years ago to the day, destroying scores of new cars and nine D-Types, ready for conversion to XKSS spec. So, just 16 examples of the XKSS left the factory in the 1950s, while the final nine were built to original spec as continuation models last year, rounding out the entire 25. And trust us – you really want to look at those pics, and listen to the engine sounds from the video. 

The one on offer from Gooding & Company is one of the originals, which makes it much, much more expensive than the continuation models – about 14 times more expensive, to be precise. And yes, it is an exceptionally large sum of money. But it’s less than the £17.5m paid last year for the D-Type that won Le Mans in 1956. 

Of course, we’ve given you the reasons why you should want one. You could even say that Steve McQueen had one, if that helps get you over the line. But if you need any more convincing after seeing these photos, you’re probably beyond help.

So, have we swayed you? Or are we just talking a bunch of cobblers?