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Words and Images Colin Porter The small and beautiful island of Malta is located in the Mediterranean Sea, just sixty miles from the coast Sicily. With a population of just over half a million, it might be hard to believe that what we perceive as a wonderful holiday destination is in fact a hot bed of classic cars. The passion of the local classic car community is unrivalled anywhere I have experience in the world. Given Malta was under British rule from the early 19th century until independence in 1964, it’s…

We have covered damper and coilover upgrades in the past but now we are specially taking a look at the packages we have created for the XJS. The XJS was the longest running production car that Jaguar built, spanning twenty-one years, until it was replaced by the XK8 in 1996. There has never been a Jaguar with more model variants than the XJS. The grand old GT can now be truly considered as a classic with early Pre-HE models approaching fifty years old. It’s very noticeable when you drive an XJS…

Much of what we learn through our experience in racing goes into our performance parts and upgrades. AVO dampers, coilover packages, Tarox brakes, Yokohama tyres, our own stainless-steel exhausts and racing cats, air-filters, silicone hoses and Maxx ECU’s and bespoke maps. It all gets tried and tested on our cars during the racing season. I thought it was worth looking back at our 2024 season to see what we have learned and to share some of the highs and at times the lows. After the long winter days preparing the cars…

You have fitted a lovey shiny new set of coilovers to your car to improve the ride and handling. So how do you know how to set up them up to get the most from them? You have the benefits of height adjustment, simply lowering the ride height might have some benefits, but to achieve the best balance with the car ideally you need to corner weight it.  Corner weighting is for race cars I hear you cry, and it is, but hear me out because there are benefits to corner…

Anyone who has owned a Jaguar for any length of time with almost certainly have some suspension bushes replaced at some point. Let’s face it we don’t own the lightest cars on the planet and nearly all Jaguars will require some new bushes during their lifetime. Rubber bushes can also degrade on cars in storage as rubber is a natural product that is affected by the environment.  For many years we have advocated fitting Powerflex bushes, they are made from Polyurethane, and they don’t degrade like standard rubber bushes and come…

As the racing year draws towards the climax, we look back on the highs and lows of Swallows 2024 season in the Jaguar Championship so far. After the early season ups and downs at Donington Park when we both had encouraging results and disappointments with the alternator on Jack’s XK8 and the supercharger belt on Rick’s XJR6, we worked hard to rectify the early teething problems. Late April we moved onto Oulton Park in Cheshire which is one of the most exciting and technically challenging circuits in the UK. On the…

This month we are going to look at fabrication and manufacturing of small quantities of parts, bespoke parts and the technology used to design and produce them. This now plays a major role in the Swallow Racing performance parts set up. A few years ago, parts manufacturing meant expensive design and tooling and high-volume parts manufacture. Now low volume parts and even one-offs can be produced at a reasonable cost using the latest technology.  As with many other of our performance parts our design and fabrication department has been directed by…

In the December 2023 magazine we wrote about tyres and the part they can play in upgrading the performance of your car or as part of an upgrade package. Tyre technology is such a large subject that I said back in December it would be something we would return to in the future. That time has arrived, and in the six months that have passed we have been able to work with our tyre partners at Yokohama a bit more closely to understand what makes their tyres so effective.  So, tyres…

In the hurly burly of running a Jaguar business sometimes it is difficult to step back and take stock of where you are and where you came from. I thought in the context of ‘Mods & Upgrades’ it might be interesting to do that, take a step back and look at where our performance parts have come from and where we are heading with them.  Swallows Independent Jaguar Specialists like the club celebrates its 40th Anniversary this year. Our Swallows Racing brand however was born from our love of motorsports in…