If you read my piece about Bob Tullius and Group 44, you’ll know I have a soft spot for the Jaguar V12’s racing adventures. Here’s one from the other side of the pond – and it’s the perfect companion story, because it was watching cars like Bob’s win in America that stirred Leyland into having another go in Europe. What followed was the Broadspeed XJ12C, a near-500bhp V12 racing car that became, almost by accident, a near-perfect allegory of the British motor industry in the 1970s.
The Broadspeed XJ12C at full chat, as it looks today
How not to go racing
The board decided in 1976 that Jaguar would go racing again, charged Ralph Broad’s Broadspeed outfit with the job, and gave a fairly good impression of believing that would be the end of it. The snag? The car that should have raced – the new XJS – wasn’t homologated. So Broad ended up with the old XJ12 instead: heavy, floppy and never designed for the work. You genuinely couldn’t make it up. Broad was refreshingly honest about it afterwards: “really a bloody awful car. Its structural rigidity was notable only by its absence, and as for the aero… well, you can see for yourself.”
Under the bonnet: the 5.3-litre V12
The fastest loser in the world
On paper the results were grim – eleven retirements from fourteen starts and one solitary podium as consolation. When the hubs weren’t failing or the wheels parting company with the car, the engines were letting go. The debut at Silverstone in 1976 set the pattern: pole position with Derek Bell at the wheel, the early laps led, then hub failure and the first of many wheels off into the distance. “It was the wrong car, it wasn’t even nearly ready and we should never have been racing it,” said Bell, “but it was certainly quick.”
In period: the Leyland-liveried XJ12C on its way
And yet – and this is the bit I love – despite all that weight, the structural issues and an aerodynamic profile best compared to Downton Abbey, in period the Broadspeed XJ12C was the fastest touring car in the world. By far. In 1977 it took poles at Monza and the Salzburgring, and at Brno two XJ12Cs locked out the front row, the second car six seconds clear of the next fastest. At the Nürburgring John Fitzpatrick took pole and broke the lap record from a standing start before the engine let go; Bell and Andy Rouse then delivered the season’s high point, nursing theirs round the Nordschleife to second place. The rest of the year passed without reward, and Zandvoort – thwarted by wet qualifying – was the only race the car entered without starting from pole. By the autumn the programme was cancelled and Broad, in poor health, retired to Portugal.
Fitzpatrick, though, adored it. “It was the quickest thing out there. And by a mile,” he said. “At the ‘Ring we were dropping the BMWs by more than 10 seconds a lap, and you don’t do that just by being quick down the straights. It really handled, too.”
Still racing: the XJ12C leading historic touring cars
What it’s like to drive
Andrew Frankel drove the surviving car for Motor Sport and summed it up beautifully: big, brutal and exquisitely ugly, a malevolent presence – with its standard dials and walnut dash on hand to remind you it was never meant to be a racing car. It sounds even ruder than the E-type, because the noise bounces around the interior, and the steering is determinedly unassisted. For the first few laps you feel you’re carrying the car round the track rather than the other way round. Then, as it warms through, it starts to make sense: occasionally savage thrust, real fluency through the corners, and a glimpse of exactly what Fitz was talking about.
Those wheel arches: the XJ12C silhouette
Why it matters to us
Because once you set the hub failures and the politics aside, there is one component nobody ever criticised: Jaguar’s V12. However wrong the car around it was, that engine kept putting the thing on pole position. It’s the same lesson we build on at Building The Legend – from re-creating the XJ13 to the tera quad-cam V12 we engineer today at our workshop in Royal Leamington Spa, close to Coventry, and in the Classic Workshop, where we keep our customers’ cars true to that standard.
The Broadspeed XJ12C never won a race, and it’s easy to laugh at it. But lap records, poles from nowhere and ten seconds a lap out of the BMWs tell their own story. This was the fastest thing in touring cars by some distance – and I rather love it for that.