We have all done it. Summer holidays… we are asked to look after cats while our parents, children, friends or neighbours go away on holiday. Some people get to look after cats of a different kind! Big Cats! Britcar Endurance Championship Technical Director David Hornsey was invited to drive the monstrous TWR built Jaguar XJS V12 Supercat during the circuit racing summer break. The event in question was the British Automobile Racing Club supported Goodwood Festival of Speed where David got the chance to make the big cat purrrr!

Ian Waterhouse on BARC TV caught up with the Britcar official at the recent round at Donington Park.

“I worked with TWR [Tom Walkinshaw Racing] for about a year, 18 months – working on chassis development for the Supercat and it was my honour to drive it at the Goodwood for its dynamic launch. The car I drove was the American press car and was the first finished car built and was back in the UK for some media and photography work as well as some events and that was the first time the public saw the car moving.”

88 of the exciting cars will be built to celebrate the 1988 Le Mans win that TWR masterminded with the Jaguar XJR-9 during the Group C era. Hornsey brings us up to speed with the stats and spec of this thunderous car!

“It is a Jaguar XJS underneath – they are all developed from an original car. It keeps some of the original chassis and keeps the original V12 block which has been bored out to 5.6 litres with a supercharger strapped on. Everything else is bespoke and new – other than the door handles! It’s such an experience to drive – for the show they put straight pipes on it to make it louder, but that’s the noise the road car makes, just at a more acceptable volume. Being in that car with 100,000 people watching with flames belching out the exhaust and noise reverberating off the flint wall was incredible. I had Radzi [Chinyanganya] one of the Goodwood presenters, alongside me on one run, and I think it fried his brain as halfway up he stopped talking as he was speechless!”

Going up the famous hill can be quite daunting – what was the weekend like in the car? We heard the car got ushered into the Shootout?

“We started the weekend just doing demo runs and I have been fortunate enough to have done lots of runs up the hill for different manufacturers over the years – so you drive at 70% and show off a bit but you make sure the car is safe. On Saturday morning Goodwood approached us as the car was creating such a buzz on social media they wanted the car to go up the hill more – but the only session available was the timed runs. I had to beg, borrow and steal some overalls, boots and off we went! It’s a lot narrower when you are pushing!”

Did you have a target then of what the car could do or what you wanted it to do?

“Before we went up, I had no idea what time we could get and didn’t really want to know as I wanted to drive it and see what would happen. We got a 58 second run on the first go and that put us fourth or fifth in the road car class which was ok. I thought if than go a little quicker in a few areas I could knock a second or two off and we ended up doing a 55 second run – third in class and beat the Ferrari and Lister Storm GT1 which I was quite pleased with. 11th overall was a really great result out of 20 something cars. It was the most intense minute I have ever had in motorsport!”