Jag fan pays it forward

Share

Enzo Ferrari, after running an appreciative eye over the curves of Jaguar's E-Type at its Geneva car show launch early in 1961, called it "the most beautiful car ever made" - a sentiment endorsed later that year by a youthful Nelson Burkhardt of Guelph, Ont., after watching a pair of them stirring up the fall leaves at the Watkins Glen circuit.

"It was gorgeous. Just so far ahead there was nothing even close to it. I just fell in love," he recalls. "But I was working on my granddad's farm for $100 a month plus room and board and a new E-Type was worth about $6,500. Obviously a little out of my price range."

Burkhardt was doing a little better financially by 1975 when he came across the 1964 E-Type that he nicknamed Blue Blood, but it still took until the late 1980s before his persistence pried it out of its owner's reluctant hands.

"I told him if anybody deserves that car, I do," says Burkhardt, and after handing over $10,500 for a Series-1 E-Type that hadn't run in 17 years and was little more than rust held together by paint. "It was a disaster to look at, but everything was there." And a three-decade love affair was at last requited, although Burkhardt, who had never driven an E-Type, would have to wait a while to drive this one.

Burkhardt and Ferrari weren't the only ones to fall for this stunningly beautiful and brilliantly fast car that became, along with the Mini, one of the most recognizable Brit motoring icons of the swinging '60s. When production ended in 1974, 72,515 E-Types (known as XKEs to most North Americans) had been produced.

The E-Type was a direct lineal descendent of a legend, the racing D-Type that won the Le Mans 24 hour race in 1955, 1956 and 1957. Jaguar turned a dozen or so of these into road-going sports cars called the XK-SS, but something more sophisticated was in the works and prototype E1A first ran in 1957, followed by a closer-to-production-suitable E2A in 1959.

The car that finally appeared under the auto show spotlights in coupe and roadster versions was a beauty from its impossibly long and elegant hood with glass covers faring in the headlamps to sumptuous leather-trimmed cockpit.

The centre and rear section were in steel with a square tube front structure to cradle the engine and mount the independent suspension (the rear was independent, too). That engine was the 3.8-litre version of Jaguar's post-war-wonder, the twin-cam inline-six that had dominated Le Mans, it made 265 hp and came with a four-speed gearbox. Disc brakes were fitted all round to slow the E-Type from its then-sensational 150 mph (242 km/h) top speed.

Burkhardt's hard-won example sat in his barn for two years before its full restoration began, initially at the hands of inmate auto body shop apprentices of the Guelph Correctional Centre where he worked as groundskeeper. After being made structurally sound and looking pretty good, it was turned over to Burkhardt's brother Edward, an award-winning restorer and master painter, who spent many more hours reworking it in detail. Even the instruments were taken apart and re-fettled.

The engine was meticulously rebuilt by the centre's auto shop instructor and ex-Jaguar mechanic Raymond Gray with machining by his pal, Paul Lambke, who was with Burkhardt that fall day in Watkins Glen.

"I tore apart one or two things, but the only real work I did on it was refinish the walnut-rimmed steering wheel," says Burkhardt. His main contribution was the money earned at a noon-hour job for the eight years it took to get the car back on the road. "I'd eat a 50-cent can of beans for lunch and go to work," doing outdoor maintenance at a condo complex. He also gave up his morning newspaper and coffee and doughnut, the money saved adding up to about $65,000 that went into the ice-blue E-Type's rejuvenation, completed in 1998. Coincidentally that year was the 50th anniversary of racing at Watkins Glen, to which he drove it, returning with the first of many awards this highly respected car has won.

Burkhardt sold the car a couple of years ago, in part to free up the considerable funds he personally spends each year on another interest, drilling and repairing wells in third world countries as a volunteer with Living Water International. He was in Haiti when the recent earthquake struck.

But while he no longer owns the E-Type, he does still get to drive it, thanks to the generosity of current owner and Jaguar enthusiast, Charlie Ormston of Waterloo, Ont. - "I've loved them since I was a child." Until purchasing Burkhardt's, Ormston had acquired 10 Jags, but not the one he really wanted, an E-Type roadster.

"He loved this car," says Ormston of Burkhardt. "It was a treasure to him, but he parted with it because he wanted to help other people. To me, that was a most extraordinary thing." And that's why he's happy to lend it, or one of his other Jags, to Burkhardt to drive in the summertime - which makes Ormston more than a little extraordinary, too.