Classic Jaguar unlocks Pink Floyd past
One-off Jaguar Mk2 tells the story of one of Pink Floyd's finest petrolhead moments
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!
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
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
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?
O'Rourke, like Mason, had the racing bug - he finished 12th at Le Mans in 1979 and had a long fascination with La Sarthe - he finished 4th in a McLaren F1GTR in 1998.
Much less so than Denny Hulme, whom I also literally bumped into at the same meet (I was distracted by the cars) - he gave me a look that would have withered Medusa, but fortunately didn't attack me.
I started looking where I was going after that...
Maybe it's because there are a few guys around me who participate in the LaCP. I've seen a Jag XK120 which was in the 1992 running, IIRC. I also know another guy who does historic racing (placed first with his Bentley 4 1/2L VdP Tourer at the LeMans Classic). Not sure if he does the Carrera. He had a bit of an "incident" at the Goodwood Revival a couple years ago. He plowed straight through the foam chicane in his ERA!
I think these proper cross-country road races were one of the great eras in motorsports. La Carrera Panamericana, Targa Florio, etc. There's a shop near me prepping two cars to race in the Peking to Paris rally in 2016. Interesting stuff. All the entrants are required to have at least two IDs and passports, in case of any trouble at border crossings. Likewise, all cars are to be built with "secret compartments" to store money! Should be interesting, seeing how the race starts in Beijing, goes through Russia and then into Ukraine, before continuing into the rest of Europe.
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