Jaguar D-Type XKD 501: From £1.7m Winner to $21.8m Legend

The world was a very different place back in the late 1990s. In the December 1999 edition of Motor Sport readers were greeted with the headline: ‘D-type Le Mans Winner Sets Auction Record’. This was the first public sale of XKD 501, the Ecurie Ecosse-run Jaguar which scored victory in the 1956 Le Mans 24 Hours, after Jaguar had pulled the plug on its own racing activities and left it to privateers to uphold the marque’s honour.

The price as sold by Christie’s? A mere £1.7m, for the car Ninian Sanderson and Ron Flockhart used to score the D-type’s penultimate Le Mans win, and the first for a D- outside of the factory. That still made this the most valuable Jaguar at the time.

Fast forward seven years and XKD 501 returned, this time at RM Sotheby’s 2016 Monterey sale, and with very different results, changing hands for a whopping $21.78m (about £16m at the time). Now that’s appreciation!

There were a number of reasons for this, primarily that XKD 501 is perhaps the most original D-type of any kind.

The first true ‘customer racing’ D-type, the car was delivered to Ecurie Ecosse team owner David Murray in April 1955, spent three seasons racing, was then sold for £10,000 (still a lot for the time) to team benefactor Major Edward Thompson. Ownership later passed to Sir Michael Nairn, meaning the car had been based in Scotland for over 40 years until that Christie’s auction, when it was finally sold to an American-based collector.

“XKD 501 scored the penultimate D-type win at Le Mans, and the first for a car outside of the Jaguar factory”

Alongside its Le Mans win, the car also took victory at the Ulster Trophy, second in the Goodwood Nine Hours and fourth at Reims. It even made an (unsuccessful) Mille Miglia entry. The RM sale dwarfed the amount paid for the D-type owned by Le Mans winner Richard Attwood, which fetched £3.2m at RM’s sale in Paris in 2015.

RM Sotheby’s Shelby Myers said at the time: “In terms of body, chassis and engine, there is no other Le Mans winner from this period that is as original as this car.”

The result stood as the highest sum ever paid at auction for a British automobile until being surpassed by the sale of Aston Martin DBR1/1 a year later.