First - and only

This uniquely bodied Jaguar SS100 won Goodwood's first motor race in the hands of its creator. Now revived, it's back at the circuit where it starred

- GRAEME HURST

The year 1948 was a significant one for British motoring and motorsport: on 18 September, racing was reestablished with the inaugural fixture at Goodwood, and on 27 October the Earls Court Motor Show opened - both for the first time since hostilities had begun in September 1939.

Britain had excelled in - and arguably pioneered - circuit racing and motor shows prior to WW2, and seeing both returning was a welcome sign of normality in an economy ravaged by war and the austerity of rationing.

No surprise, then, that some 15,000 spectators headed to the Chichester track (created from the perimeter road at what was RAF Westhampnett) to see the flag drop at 2pm for the first postwar motor race. The three-lap event, one of eight that day, was won by FC Pycroft in an unusual-looking Jaguar SS100, seeing off a small field of Healeys and an HRG from the back of the grid. Just over a month later, the Jaguar SS100's replacement, the XK120, blew the lights out at Earls Court when it made its spectacular debut. Jaguar aficionados have long surmised that there may be a link between the two events...

That's certainly the case in the view of Paul de Ferranti Craddock Pycroft himself: in 1984, in these very pages, he contested marque historian Paul Skilleter's assertion that Jaguar boss William Lyons had not copied his design for the XK120, after Pycroft demonstrated his unique, aerodynamically bodied SS to the works in 1947. At face value Pycroft’s claim was not outlandish, given the cars’ similarities, but historians contend that the XK’s final lines owe more to the influence of the BMW 328 that featured on the 1940 Mille Miglia. Also that its shape had been defined by a factory prototype, for which photographic evidence exists, as much as a year before Pycroft’s trip to Foleshill. Whatever the link, his special-bodied SS100 made an impression on anyone who saw it. And plenty did when it took the chequer in that inaugural race, with