The Jaguar D-Type sports-racing car design is one of the most desirable and most coveted of all truly historic and definingly classic cars.

During the 1950s 'the D-Type' combined the most sophisticated of chassis structures with the most robust and contemporarily advanced of all volume-production twin-overhead camshaft engine designs.

Clothe the completed assembly in Malcolm Sayer's exquisitely handsome and well-proportioned body design, then add the model's stupendous record of fine-focused racing achievement, and the appeal of the Jaguar marque's front-engined finest becomes simply unchallengeable.

Sir William Lyons of the Jaguar Car Company aimed his sleekly curvaceous, finely streamlined D-Types squarely at winning the world's most prestigious single motor race – the Le Mans 24-Hours – and from 1955-1957 the cars scored an historic hat-trick of victories there.

And while it had been a factory 'Longnose' D-Type which won for the first time in 1955, it was subsequently the Ecurie...