Jaguar Aero Lightweight

A steel-tub replica of the original Lindner-Nocker aero lightweight (rebodied by Malcom Sayer). This photo was taken at Dunford's in England prior to paint and shows what the shape looked like to some of the air molecules. In 1963, Jaguar borrowed John Combs' GTO and compared it with the Jag in the MIRA full-scale wind tunnel. I gave my copy of that report, together with my other research, to the Boulder Colorado Cobra museum, but you can probably find the report on the internet.

I purchased the car from Simon Dunford who runs Dunford Cars. When Lynx Cars went into bankruptcy (from which they emerged), Dunford hired many of their fabricators and began to produce the Linder-Nocker replicas just as Lynx had. This was Simon Dunford's personal car, their demonstrator and the car used in their advertisements.

These first five photos were taken in England in Dunford's shop. The dry sump oil tank in the photo's foreground (left side engine compartment) is not operational as the engine was a wet-sump, but it was the correct tank. Otherwise, the car was awfully close, with magnesium wheels, and the bodywork rivets matching the original's, rivet for rivet. I had Dunford convert the car from RHD to LHD which was probably a mistake, given the amount of driving I would do, and the originality of the RHD.

This was a very comfortable car to drive and I took it on a 500-mile round trip from Phoenix to Bisbee, Arizona. I parked it outside the hotel and it hailed, fortunately not hard enough to create a million little dents. I reached over 140 mph on the highway from Bisbee to Sierre Vista ,crossing the San Pedro river, but the uneven road surface and my old-style bias belted racing tires let the car move around at speed. The 3.8 litre motor revved higher than the 4.2 but didn't have the torque.

The original also had this line of rivets on both sides of the bodywork. The underside was pretty clean and the entire car was beautifully done, though with the inevitable sorting problems. I soon found I didn't need so many cars -- I couldn't drive more than one at a time, but they all needed work. My dream had been to assemble first-class replicas of all the GT III cars of the '63-65 period, but I found I had better things to occupy my time.

I took this from the roof of our carport after I had completed a revegetation of much of our yard. This photo shows the sharp drop off of the Jag's tail area which Brock felt was excessive -- it would cause airflow separation. This is why cars like the Cobra coupe and Ferrari LM chopped off their tail -- the Kamm tail. There is a great photo of the original Lindner-Nocker aerodynamic lightweight on page 174 of the book.