Tom Talks

We were recently honoured to be invited to give a talk to Warwickshire – Coventry & Hinckley, JEC Region at the Jaguar Sports & Social Club at Browns Lane. Going to the ‘home’ of Jaguar adds a degree of pressure, then in addition members of the region are past Jaguar employees adds another level. Brian Reid who for over thirty has been a leading committee member of the region gives his report on Tom’s talk. The last meeting hosted Swallows Racing. Tom our speaker, started racing an XJR Supercharged X300 model back in 2016. The Supercharged car was slower than many of the normally aspirated XJS and saloons and suffered from reliability and overheating issues. Then the development started. The supercharger creates a lot of heat and uses liquid coolant to cool the charge. The answer here was to cool the air using an air-cooled system similar to a turbo charged vehicles. This takes the pressure off the cooling system so no more overheating. The power was then increased by re-designing the inlet manifold which from Jaguar does not flow very well especially for racing.   With new higher output injectors, better coil packs and a revised supercharger the car became a lot more competitive. It now regularly wins races. Tom showed us an in-car video of a race before the modifications and another one after modifying and the improvement was obvious.   Tom and Colin also brought along a few of their products including huge brake callipers which look like they would stop a 747 yet were so light you could easily lift them with one finger. The beautifully welded exhaust systems were also impressive and their improved suspension parts, braking systems all being especially manufactured. A lot of these parts are available for road cars as well and represent a considerable improvement over the standard Jaguar components.   So if you fancy improving the performance of your Jaguar, Swallows Racing is the place to go! They also do a stand alone injection and spark system which again improves the performance of your standard or supercharged car. This would also allow you to fit the AJ6 or AJ16 engine to replace the very expensive (to rebuild) antique XK engine in the older Jaguars. Swallows Racing is a superb outfit providing support to several racing drivers, but also racing themselves.   Our thanks go to Tom and Colin who gave us a very interesting and informative meeting with many thanks to Brian Reid for setting things up. Photo: Richard Shelton