Received an email from a mate in the UK who had just seen a TV programme regarding restoration of ‘classic’ vehicles. This covered a ground up restoration of an early E-type Jaguar. The finished article looked superb and was highly acclaimed by many specialists in the programme, but the cost! The owner said that it had cost 85,000 British pounds which was 20,000 over his budget. It was, of course, a virtually new car, so how much would a new E-type cost today? I guess not far from the same amount, but who wants a new, 40 year old car?

Jaguar XJS

That, of course, is the nub of it all. People spend countless thousands of hours and dollars/pounds or whatever restoring these classic cars, but when they are finished, what have they really got - a very expensively obtained museum piece. While the E-type in its day was mind-blowing, compared to today’s Jaguars it is a dinosaur, complete with dinosaur technology. That 6 cylinder Jaguar lump was designed in the 40’s and first arrived in the XK 120 in the early 50’s. That is no technological masterpiece to be revered and worshipped - that’s a boat anchor!

The chemist next door to my surgery in Oz was a concourse fanatic and owned the Jaguar XJS pictured here. The car was 11 years old when he bought it, and it was in good enough condition for you and me to take it to the local car wash and sit back with a bottle of vino and then have photographs taken of yourself standing beside it. But not for my chemist.

The Jag was taken to the body shop where it spent the next 14 weeks, being totally disassembled, taken back to bare metal and resprayed. On getting the car home, he then took 24 photographs of the engine bay, so that everything could go back in the right place, every little clip, ferrule and pipe.

The next step was to hire a retired wrench for 5 days to dismantle the ancillaries from the engine so that he could clean the V12 block and heads. Only when that was done did the engine bay get reassembled, with washers of differing thicknesses being used so that when everything was torqued down, the screw slots all pointed in the same direction! Certain areas of the valley in the V12 had to be sluiced with degreaser to be cleaned. To remove the fluid? You use a long straw and suck it out! This, gentle reader, is auto fanaticism at its best!

Many weeks were then spent under the car in the classic Michelangelo position, cleaning the dirt of several years from the underbody. I wonder if the Sistine chapel painter had to clean the ceiling first before he painted it? My chemist had to!

Everyone who has ever owned a British car or motorcycle knows that oil leaks are the Standard British Industry method of slowing down rust production, and as such are a non-delete factory option. However, this is not the case for the concourse vehicle which has points deducted for oil incontinence. The gearbox in this XJS went back three times before the auto shop could stop the weeping (both the gearbox and the chemist)!

With a concourse vehicle, the standard of preparation has to be faultless. If cleanliness is next to godliness, then the true concourse car is in line to be the next Pope.

Now what you also have to realise is that these concourse cars have to be original in every respect as well. The chap with the 427 Galaxy V8 installed in the E-type need not bother entering. These cars have to be automotive vestal virgins. Our chemist had one point deducted because he had put on a very nice Momo steering wheel to replace the thin and horrible Jaguar one. You may enhance, remanufacture, refurbish and retouch - bit it must appear original.

The auto racer hears all sorts of noises as the car gets driven to the grid. Anxiety becomes obvious. Will the car make it to the chequered flag? For the concourse entrant, this anxiety is mirrored on the way to the concourse judging arena. Every taxi cab looks like a competitor from “Days of Thunder” and every stone on the road looks ready to cannon into the unchipped (brand new) windshield. With my chemist and his Jaguar, he made it unscathed to the judging area but as he opened his door to get out, the passenger in the car next to him did the same thing. The resulting contact was to lose him 2 1/2 points in the section called “Straightness of Exterior Panels”.

However, he did win the Concourse, both for XJS and overall best Jaguar that year with a score of 598 points from a possible of 650. The effort had taken thousands of dollars and 400 hours of the chemist’s time. Was it really worth the time and money spent? The answer is probably the meaning of life or the riddle of the universe, but my chemist said it best when he penned the following four lines to finish this article.

“Why do I concourse, instead of pit-crewing it?

Why polish and paint and keep screwing and gluing it?

And loving and hating and laughing and rueing it?

If I knew why I did it, I’d probably stop doing it!”

The rumour mongers have it that when the new season gets underway, Heinz-Harry Frentzen will be driving for Orange Arrows this year. Apparently, somebody has also been going through his bank books and says that H-HF was on 6 million pounds last year at Jordan, but at Arrows he will be scarcely making ends meet, getting only 450,000 British pounds per year, or otherwise expressed as 1,232 British pounds a day (that’s about 28 million baht annually, or in monthly salary terms, 2.3 million baht, or a trifling 76,000 baht a day in the bank).

Now while I have been crazily passionate about motor racing most of my life, almost half a million quid is still far too much of an annual salary. Motor racing is a personal selfish passion - driving F1 cars does nothing to help the oppressed, the needy or elevate the standards in the world, so why the big money? Schumi, the best driver around by far, makes over 50 million dollars a year. This is obscene! I’m sorry, you cannot justify this in any way. The best brain surgeon in the world gets nowhere that sort of money, despite around a dozen years training and the making of life or death decisions for other people. So the race driver “risks” his own life. So? It is his choice and not one that should be rewarded in his bank account.

That reminds me of the tale about the brain surgeon whose toilet blocked one day. He rang the emergency plumber who came over and fixed it in 10 minutes. “That’ll be $500,” said the plumber. “Goodness me,” said the brain surgeon, “Not even I as a brain surgeon makes that kind of money.” “Neither could I, when I was one,” replied the plumber!