NEWS NEWSFRONT Vale JAGUAR CLASSIC BUILDS MORE C-TYPES

It's what we dislike having to do mostly in publishing this magazine, and this time we farewell the former Doris England, second wife of Jaguar Service Director then Company chief, Loft England.

Austrian-born Doris worked for Jaguar at Browns Lane where they met, and when Lofty retired in 1974 the couple settled in the hills of beautiful Austria. Doris and Lofty were very good friends of this magazine and hosted two of our tour groups at their home. Doris remarried after Lofty's passing in 1996, and spent the rest of her life in the US. Another shock loss was one of those very capable behind-the-scenes TWR engineers who brought glory to the marque with the XJ-S and Silk Cut racers, Alva Claxton. Alva was a popular and long serving team member who prepared and manned Tom Walkinshaw's XJ-S, and Le Mans winning Jaguar racers. RIP Doris and Alva.

In spite of Jaguar Classic creating enormously damaging publicity for the marque by suing a Scandinavian couple who were building a replica C-Type, it has announced it is building two more new replicas of its own.

When it created new D-Types, XK-SSs and Lightweight E-Types it claimed it was utilising unused 1950s and '60s chassis numbers. For the C-Type there were no unused chassis numbers, and C-Type replicas have been created internationally for over half a century, so like most others we are puzzled by their continuing action.

It announced: "Jaguar Classic has revealed two exclusive C-Type Continuations to celebrate the vehicle’s pioneering achievements in 1953. Each ‘70-Edition’ features distinctive specifications and will be built at Jaguar’s state of the art Classic Works facility in Coventry. The two Jaguar C-Type Continuations have been revealed seventy years (almost) after C-Types, equipped with pioneering disc-brakes which were at the pinnacle of sportscar racing including dominating the 1953 24 Hours of Le Mans."