|
JAGUAR XKSS HISTORY
The revered XKSS (‘SS’ believed to stand for super sport) made its way to Jaguar lore after Briggs Cunnigham’s interest in meeting Sports Car Club of America’s (SCCA) specifications for production car racing. The D-type Jaguar was used as a road going vehicle in the UK, but was not viewed by the SCCA as a production car used for racing. The XKSS was produced to satisfy the SCCA production car requirement using the remaining D-type inventory. The goal was to create more XKSS’s because there weren’t believed to be fifty D-types lying around to use for XKSS conversion. A masterpiece resulted, which, with the prototype, over-sold 25 cars at the New York auto show that year.
Sixteen cars were finished or semi-finished when a fire on the evening of February 12, 1957 destroyed the Brown’s Lane factory, tooling and remaining nine cars. Out of the sixteen cars, twelve went to the US, two to Canada and one to Hong Kong. The remaining car stayed in the UK, thus concluding XKSS production. Today, an original XKSS will bring close to $2,000,000.00 at auction.
Click on the links below for information and photos of the various RAM XKSS replica systems.
|
