This car, Lot 130, sold for $6,446,019 (CHF 5,181,250), including buyer’s premium, at Broad Arrow Auctions’ Zürich, CHE, sale, on November 1, 2025.
The essential question surrounding today’s subject is whether, and to what extent, an excellent but never-raced example of a famous racing car can carry the value of its famous, successfully campaigned brothers.
Being around the old-racing-car business for as long as I have has given me a certain perspective on the market. My company bought its first D-type in 2004 for $1.5 million, and others since. Over the years, I have written three profiles of these cars, ranging from $2.1 million (2006) through $3.7 million (2015) to $21.8 million in 2016 (a wild outlier). They are wonderful, highly collectible and usable cars, but at least by racing-car standards, Jaguar built quite a lot of them, so there is a consistent market. If you, the reader, have a particular interest in D-types, I refer you to the three earlier profiles that I have written on these cars, available in the online archives on SCM’s website. Rather than rehashing too much of what I have already written, I will summarize the important points so we can spend more time discussing our subject car in today’s market.
A fresh start
In the beginning, Jaguar never really intended to get into the racing-car business. During the late 1930s, its business was selling comfortable, good-performing sedans and a few sporting SS roadsters — sort of an “affordable Bentley” approach. During the war, Sir William Lyons, the boss, realized that when the war was over the market was going to expect more than warmed-over 1930s designs. In anticipation, he and the engineers spent their evenings dreaming up a new, modern engine to power new, modern cars. They settled on concept “XK,” a DOHC straight-6 with an iron block and aluminum head, basically borrowed from the late 1930s Alfa Romeo 6C 2500.
As production started back up after the war, Lyons decided that to properly introduce the new engine, it would be best to build a racy sports car as a show special for the 1948 Earl’s Court exhibition. The new car was called the XK120 after the engine and how fast they thought the car could go. It blew everybody away, and Jaguar decided to build 200 as a way of sorting out the new powertrain. It soon couldn’t build enough of them, and Jaguar found itself in the performance-sports-car business. Racing seemed a great way to promote the XK120, and Jaguar entered three cars at Silverstone in 1949, finishing 1st and 2nd. Three cars were then entered at Le Mans in 1951 and performed respectably, proving that Jaguar had something special. The next step was to win the endurance race.
Highly advanced
Winning was going to take more than a standard 120, so Jaguar initiated the XK120 Competition (aka C-type). It shared little but the engine and drivetrain with the 120, being a tube-frame design, but it tried to look somewhat similar to the road car. C-types won Le mans in 1951 and 1953, by which time Jaguar was a very successful company. It was time for it to step up and create a worthy successor: the D-type.
Aside from the engine and drivetrain, which were evolutions of the original 120, the D-type was a complete clean-sheet overhaul. Today, most people think of it as a late-1950s racing car, but it debuted in 1954, and for the time it was a technological masterpiece.
The basic chassis was an aircraft-style monocoque design; the next racing car to use the concept was the Lotus 25, eight years later. The D-type used disc brakes on all four wheels, five years before Ferrari adopted them. The engineered body design was aerodynamically spectacular for both low drag and stability at a time when Ferrari was depending on sheer horsepower in outsourced bodies. It was a radical design — a paradigm change that took the rest of the racing world almost 10 years to match. And I can speak from personal experience to confirm that the D-type is a wonderfully fun thing to drive: supple, solid, predictable and immensely friendly. It’s a great racer and a comfortable tour car for vintage rallying.
Value in preservation
All of which gets us to a consideration of value. Collectible old racing cars tend to be valued based on three major factors: racing history, originality and condition (in varying degrees of importance). Generally, it is difficult to optimize all three; it’s more like “pick two.” Great racing history means that a car was used as a weapon in the day, “rode hard and put up wet,” as the saying goes. The very definition of giving your all to win accepts that there isn’t always much left at the end. This in turn affects originality and condition, particularly since virtually all used race cars went through a “just an old, beat-up racer that nobody wants” period. Stuff got thrown away, pieces got shuffled and chassis numbers got confused or lost, then “rediscovered” when the cars became valuable.
One option is to find one that was never seriously raced (or raced at all, like today’s subject) and thus has a reasonable chance of being both very original and in excellent condition. This is not unusual with D-types, as Jaguar built 71 cars, not all of which had long competition histories, and was unable to sell all of them as intended. As a way of making them saleable, 16 cars were converted into road-going XKSS models, and these have become extremely collectible. Our subject was a road demonstrator and partially converted to an XKSS, then converted back, but remains genuinely original and in excellent condition.
A few D-types have huge racing history and carry exceptional value, but over the past 25 years, most of them — both ordinary racers and street versions — have traded in a predictable range. I used the SCM Platinum database to run some numbers. Starting at about $1 million in 2000, auction sale prices have bounced around (they went crazy in 2016–18, then fell back) but over 25 years have grown at a roughly 6.8% annual rate (vs. about 2.7% for the Consumer Price Index). This gives a projected value of $5.5 million today. Our subject did substantially better than that, but it was a very good car, particularly for someone wanting a touring queen. I suggest it was fairly bought and sold.
