Start with what the Jaguar D-Type is: a Roadster with 210.04 cuin XK6 I6, built from 1954 to 1957, at the height of the post-war boom. What it meant takes a little longer. The shape is credited to Malcolm Sayer. 71 were built.
How it came about
The Jaguar D-Type is a sports racing car that was produced by Jaguar Cars Ltd. between 1954 and 1957. Designed specifically to win the Le Mans 24-hour race, it shared the straight-6 XK engine and many mechanical components with its C-Type predecessor. Its structure, however, was radically different, with innovative monocoque construction and slippery aerodynamics that integrated aviation technology, including in some examples a distinctive vertical stabilizer. Engine displacement began at 3.4 litres, was enlarged to 3.8 L in 1957, and reduced to 3.0 L in 1958 when Le Mans rules limited engines for sports racing cars to that maximum.
D-Types won Le Mans in 1955, 1956 and 1957. After Jaguar temporarily retired from racing as a factory team, the company offered the remaining unfinished D-Types as street-legal XKSS versions, whose perfunctory road-going equipment made them eligible for production sports car races in America. In 1957 25 of these cars were in various stages of completion when a factory fire destroyed nine of them. Total production is thought by some to have totaled 71 D-Types, including 18 for factory teams and 53 for privateers (plus an additional 16 D-Types were converted into road-legal XKSS versions). Jaguar is quoted as claiming it built 75 D-Types.
The hardware
The engine is 210.04 cuin XK6 I6; other versions carried different engines, listed in the specification table below. The layout matters: a front engine drives the rear wheels, the classic proportion — long bonnet, cabin set back — that most people picture when they picture a sports saloon or a grand tourer. These are manufacturer figures carried by Wikipedia and Wikidata, not road-test measurements.
Family and rivals
In the Jaguar line-up the Jaguar D-Type has a clear place: it replaced the Jaguar C-Type; it handed the line to the Jaguar E-Type; the factory was Coventry, United Kingdom. The cars a buyer would have weighed it against include the Mercedes-Benz 300 SL, the Mercedes-Benz S-Class, the Chevrolet Corvette. Its Jaguar stablemates include the F-Type and the Vanden Plas.
Owning one today
There is no federal ownership record for the Jaguar D-Type — it predates the complaint database or was never sold in the United States — so MotorJury publishes no running-cost figure for it. For a car of this age the price is set by the collector market and the condition of the individual example, not by a formula.