Classic Jaguar unlocks Pink Floyd past

One-off Jaguar Mk2 tells the story of one of Pink Floyd's finest petrolhead moments

How's this for a car with an interesting history? A three-door Jaguar Mk2 saloon from the early Sixties once raced by Pink Floyd's David Gilmour, yours for £12,000.

The story gets better. The event Gilmour and the band's manager Steve O'Rourke campaigned this intriguing car in was the revived La Carrera Pan Americana rally in 1992 through central America.

This happened in '91; a safer car needed!

This info had us in full Google mode and that brought us to the discovery (well, we hadn't heard of it) that Pink Floyd made a video complete with soundtrack of their exploits on the 1991 Pan Americana.

Check out the YouTube clips of this and you'll find it's about as good as you could possible hope for a video shot in the early Nineties. "Six days, two and a half thousand miles" says one of the guys in their very plummy English accents, followed by driving guitar, a fruity exhaust and a shot from behind the barely-there windscreen of one of the two Jaguar C-type Proteus replicas used. What's not to like?

Guitarist Gilmour and O'Rourke were in one, while drummer Nick Mason with racer Valentine Lindsay were in another, but Gilmour and O'Rourke's race was cut short by a nasty crash that broke one of O'Rourke's legs.

That accident explains the attention to safety on the Mk2 Jaguar to be used the following year, according to the seller, dealer Nicholas Overall. "It was a big accident. They really thought they were finished," he told PistonHeads.

Looking a little forlorn, but what history

According to Overall the desire to strengthen the car was reason why the rear, driver's-side door is welded shut. There's also a big roll cage inside and long-range race tank, as well as perspex in place of the side-glass and uprated suspension with Koni dampers.

The car was raced but the guys failed to finish after the propshaft broke. Overall reckons they did around half of it.

There are no pictures he can find of the car in action, which is a shame (anyone on PH got one?) but the provenance isn't in doubt, not with Steve O'Rourke's name on the V5.

That he's still registered as the previous keeper shows the car hasn't been revived since coming back from the Pan Americana, and it's all looking a bit sad at the moment, with the 3.8-litre engine out of the chassis and plenty of work needed to get it in a state where it might be considered for historic saloon racing.

That's just patina

We like that the names of Gilmour and O'Rourke are painted on the side along with their blood groups in a Gothic script. And nothing else. Probably had little need for sponsors (although their Proteus Jags were heavily stickered up with Labatt's low-alcohol lager logos).

The car and its mission confirm the Floyd as arguably the most PH band ever. Nick Mason of course we all know from his impeccable car collection, while O'Rourke was a race addict who went so far as to cover himself with glory in a number of Le Mans outings with his EKMA team (the name of his management company), taking 12th on his first try in 1979 at the wheel of a Ferrari 512BB.

Pink Floyd. They really are a fine advert for serious wealth, aren't they?

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