LYNX 1963 LOW-DRAG E-TYPE

In the Indian summer of 1961, Wolfgang von Trips was killed at Monza in the Ferrari Sharknose, and an American college student—a Trips fan—made a gesture about driving fast cars to mark his passing. He swapped his first car, a Fiat 1100 sedan, for the first sports car he saw for sale, a 1954 Jaguar XK120, and for many months, through a cold Boston winter, never put the top up and drove as if speed and high revs could bring the dead German back.

That person never told that story, and it only rose to the surface when Lynx Chairman John Mayston-Taylor showed your reporter his father’s pristine XK-120 sitting in the Lynx workshops in deepest Sussex on the south coast of England, and revealed that it was, for him, “the start of it all.” The set of German-linked Jaguar coincidences went a step further when it became clear that the car we were there to test was inspired by another Jaguar, driven by a German, the famed E-Type low-drag coupe of Peter Lindner and Peter Nocker, the car which Lindner crashed fatally at Monthléry, creating the birth of a myth and an enduring interest in these rare coupes.