While some people in the grand scheme of life manage to make a name for themselves having really done very little worthy of note, there is another type, the kind of person who isn’t in the limelight, but has done more in a lifetime than most can ever dream of.
It was a champagne week for Daniel Sexton Gurney back in mid-summer of 1967, when he won the Le Mans 24-hours for Ford one Sunday and was a winner again the next weekend when he took the laurels in the Belgian Grand Prix in his own Eagle.
Reid Railton was the most important figure in the field of high-speed performance engineering in Britain between the wars yet he never really received the credit he deserved for his amazing achievements. He was always the slim figure in the background, in a fedora and prescription sunglasses if the background was the Bonneville Salt Flats. Railton engineered the final and fastest versions of Malcolm Campbell’s Bluebirds and he designed and built a twin- engined 4-wheel-drive Land Speed Record car for John Cobb that was amazingly advanced yet devastatingly simple. It was the first car to top 400mph.
All we enthusiasts know how seductive cars can be and there have been dozens of men, clear- headed and successful in business, who have lost a lot of money trying to create their dream cars.
In the UK, in the motoring section of The Sunday Times a weekly feature is this weeks new supercar. In many cases the only person to show an interest is the guy’s bank manager.
Between 1951 and 1953, 52 Jaguar C-types (or XK120C) left the Browns Lane works in Coventry. Following the strong showing by almost standard XK120's at the 1950 Le Mans 24 Hours, Jaguar founder William Lyons decided to have a proper attempt at the 1951 edition of the Grand Prix d'Endurance at the legendary Sarthe circuit, two hours southwest of Paris.
