Looks scary, doesn’t IT? Sounds scary, too. As in ‘throw yourself flat on the floor when it starts’ scary. The noise is that of a 12-bore shotgun at the point of discharge, sampled and repeated ad infinitum into one continuous sound. And that’s just at idle. If someone gives it a blip, some primal instinct will tell you to run away.

But it’s not scary at all. In fact the Group 44 E-type is one of the easiest racing cars you could imagine driving.

It is the work of one Bob Tullius, who’ll be resurfacing later on in these pages. By the time Jaguar USA’s British-born marketing director Mike Dale approached him, Tullius’s Group 44 race team had campaigned Triumphs and MGs with some success in the US. This was 1974, the world was in the middle of an oil crisis, the E-type was out of date and Dale had a staggering 6000 of them without homes to go to.