Raced 1956 Jaguar D-Type with 70-year history could reach $7 million at Gooding Christie's

Gooding Christie's has put a 1956 Jaguar D-Type, chassis number XKD 552, on the block for its inaugural Retromobile New York sale on November 21. The auction house carries an estimate of $6 million to $7 million for the car, and it is the first time the example has ever been offered for sale.

The car is not a garage queen. Since a Florida-based weekend racer acquired it in 2003, it has been campaigned at the Monaco Historic Grand Prix, the Goodwood Revival, the Monterey Historics and the Mille Miglia Storica, often with the owner's son riding as co-driver.

It has also run the 1,000-mile Colorado Grand and the D-Type and C-Type tours organized by Terry Larson, the Arizona-based Jaguar restorer who rebuilt the car. Between competitions it has appeared at concours events from Amelia Island to The Quail, A Motorsports Gathering.

"This D-Type has done it all, and is a great candidate to do it again," said Angus Dykman, specialist at Gooding Christie's. "Unlike so many cars like this that sit in collections, it has been campaigned successfully at many of the world's greatest motoring events."

Dykman's research traces XKD 552 to the Browns Lane assembly line in mid-1956, weeks after Jaguar took its second of three Le Mans victories with the then-new D-Type. It left the factory in a muted Battleship Grey, built with no customer order on the books.

That unpromising start became the car's first footnote. Jaguar was struggling to sell the open-topped, aluminum-bodied racer, so the car was shuffled between British dealers to generate interest. By November 1956 it had returned to headquarters and joined the company's stock of unsold D-Types, one of the 71 built between 1954 and 1957.

A buyer emerged on May 6, 1957, when the car was shipped to Lowis and Hodgkiss, Jaguar's Nairobi distributor, and delivered to South African racer John Manussis. He had previously owned an ex-works C-Type and campaigned it across Europe; in Kenya he raced the D-Type at the newly opened Nakuru Park in the Rift Valley.

A year later Manussis sold it to fellow South African Nolis Samaras, who repainted the car bright red with a broad white stripe and also raced it regularly at Nakuru Park. In 1963 it crossed to Canada, bought by Montreal jewelry designer Roger Lucas, who had it redone in gold.

Photographs included with the lot show Lucas parading the Jaguar through Montreal streets and parking it outside his store flanked by bodyguards. By 1965 the car had passed to Canadian photojournalist Don Newlands, and in 1989 it shipped to Switzerland to join the collection of Eric Traber.

It was Traber who commissioned Larson to carry out a full restoration at his Arizona workshop. Larson painted the body pale yellow at the owner's request, added the trademark D-Type fin behind the driver, and removed the original 3.4-liter inline-six XK engine for safekeeping, fitting a rebuilt replacement.

The restoration returned the car to competition. East Coast collector-racer Bruce Lustman bought it in 1991, then Ned Spieker of Atherton, California, in 1997, entering it in the Mille Miglia Storica and the Monterey Historics before the current custodian took over in 2003.

In 2014 the car contested the Lavant Cup, the dedicated race for D-Types at that year's Goodwood Revival. That race-anywhere history is what Dykman is banking on. He calls the estimate "approachable" for a car of this caliber.

"It is rare to find a D-Type that has both a rich, engaging history and retains so many original components, exhibiting a high level of overall purity," Dykman said. That observation points to the appeal of a machine kept on circuits rather than sealed in climate-controlled storage.

The estimate is well below the benchmark set by the most valuable D-Type. A Le Mans-winning 1955 example, chassis XKD 501, sold for $21.78 million at RM Sotheby's Monterey sale in 2016, a figure that anchors today's expectations for the breed.

How the estimate measures up

Jaguar built only 71 D-Types, and surviving examples rarely reach the open market, which is why our guide to the best classic cars treats the marque's competition cars as among the most sought-after British machinery ever made.

That guide puts the Jaguar E-Type among our top-ranked collectibles, behind the Aston Martin DB5 and the Ferrari 250 GTO. A racing D-Type occupies a different tier, its value driven by provenance and originality rather than any single production figure.

Jaguar itself now stands at a crossroads. As we noted in our survey of British car brands, Tata Motors' JLR holds the marque, and it has withdrawn its entire lineup ahead of an electric relaunch, a move that has pushed it out of the top ten in our most-searched luxury car rankings.

A D-Type from 1956 has nothing in common with that future, and everything to do with the past it raced through. The November 21 sale in New York gives a buyer the chance to own a car that has run Monaco, Goodwood, the Mille Miglia and Nakuru Park in the course of a single, continuous life.