Thank Frankel It's Friday – How To Drive A C‑Type Round Monaco

Ok, that’s a complete lie. I’ve watched many hundreds of motor races and enjoyed almost all, but to drive anything at competitive speeds around the Principality even if you only ever get to do it once – as I am sure will be the case for me – is a memory to put in the same box as your wedding day, passing your test, and finding out who shot JR.

So I thought I’d briefly talk you around a lap, taken in that rarest of things, a C-type Jaguar as standard as the day it actually raced for real in the only Monaco Grand Prix ever held for sports cars, back in 1952.

You pass the pits in the fourth and final of its gears, going surprisingly fast. Although the road is far from straight it’s still flat out and affords absolutely the only chance you’re going to get of having a decent squint at the dials. Here the water temperature is the one most in need of attention: not only are C-types marginal on cooling at the kind of low average speeds afforded by Monaco, the closeness of the buildings allows very little air to circulate. Genuinely it is an issue.

Saint Devote is one of Monaco’s trickier turns first because it’s quicker than it looks, second because it’s still child’s play to run out of room at the exit where you’ll find not a nice grass verge or gravel trap, but a wall. The one thing you do not want here is understeer and, happily and like most Jags I’ve driven of both road and racing persuasion, the C understeers hardly at all.

Hard up the hill, threading the needle between left and right kerbs. What you’re looking for, of all things, is a pedestrian crossing which signals the point where you need to slow and turn into Massanet. The problem is that part of Monaco is clearly very popular with the Monegasque road crossing community who are consequently very well provisioned in this respect. Two years out I can’t remember which exact crossing you need to spot but if you go one too early it’ll ruin your lap, one too late in someone else’s C-type and it’ll ruin your life.

In an old car Massanet is the most difficult corner on the track, because you have to enter fast and exit slow, the precise reverse of how such machines like to tackle corners. Also if you’re going to get distracted by the architecture, it’ll be here and while there are many recognized ways of arriving outside at the Hotel de Paris, backwards in a crumpled C-type is not yet among them.

Casino Square is easy and allows you to show off at the exit and so long as you remember to dodge the rise in the road as you descend to Mirabeau (a courtesy still required of modern F1 machinery) there’s not much to delay you here. The sequence of slow corners that takes you down to the sea from here may be among Monaco’s most famous but they’re far from best to drive. Actually they’re quite dull.

But at least they give you time to prepare yourself for the tunnel. F1 cars take it flat out, C-types most certainly do not. You need a little lift as it tightens in the middle but you’ll still be travelling faster at the exit than at any other point on the track, desperately trying to contain the car’s desire to oversteer. Squirting the tail out in second gear around Monaco’s hairpins is good fun, feeling it lurch into roll oversteer at better than 100mph with the wall of a tunnel just inches away is anything but. At least for me.

F1 cars keep accelerating at the exit but in the C you need to brake for the chicane as soon feel the sun on your face. Or visor. The chicane is just annoying but the Tabac corner that follows is one of the best you’ll find on any circuit in the world. Take a deep breath, lob it in and feel the car drift to the exit. To do that, in this car and around this place is as surreal an experience as I’ve had behind the wheel.

Then comes the swimming pool, which rewards commitment on entry and care on exit before the Rascasse and the one every one forgets: Antony Noghes. The really quick guys use the kerb at the exit to slingshot back onto the pit straight. I’m not one of the quick guys, but got through my race, overtook a couple of people including another C-type and didn’t put a mark on the car. Where I come from, life gets no better than that.