Photos: Paolo Lekai
Nic Cuarta knew the D-type before he knew the guy who owned it. He was cutting his teeth at his family's vintage Jaguar shop in Florida when it came through the door, sent over by, as he remembers it, "some guy who's like a magazine dude, car magazine guy." He never touched it. Stood there thinking wow, this D-type's really cool. Years later he was standing up Beeline in Santa Cruz and the same car lived a couple of blocks over, owned by Jay. He'd already run it through two rounds of sorting before it ever sat in Nic's bay.
Jay is an advisor to the business now. Mentor, and the person Nic talks to when the week gets long. He's got a way with words. His read on the market for cars like this is that there are more whales than there are places to swim. Nic splits the people who buy them into two camps. One likes how the thing looks. The other likes the process, Victorian-house people who fall in love with the project or want out by year one. Jay isn't the client who put an IMSA engineer under a G-body and peltier-cooled the ignition modules because he could. He's up for the work. Money was the easy part.
Nic isn't the mechanic on it anymore. The shop grew past that. He's the context, the one who knows what's already been done and tells the technicians what comes next. Right now that's jetting the Webers. The car has had a snappy on-off throttle since Jay bought it, bogs on tip-in. "Classic Weber hot motor problem," Nic says. Race carburetor on a sport cam, driven on the street. Never quite right. Before that it was a steering rack with so much play on center nobody trusted it. The old one had been mounted at the wrong height and worn itself out, so they put a new one in and relocated it. Then a thermostatic fan so the thing would stop cooking itself on a summer drive.
The car is a replica, built up from Jaguar bits of the period and later versions of what Jaguar designed then. The motor is an XK, twin-cam straight six with shims under the buckets and no variable anything. Jaguar chased displacement with stroke instead of bore. Long-stroke torque motor. Doesn't rev to the moon and doesn't need to. Dual-spark race versions were making 400 on race gas years ago. This one is around 300 in a car that weighs about what a '71 911 weighs. Momentum car until you get back on the throttle. The chassis is why it can take that. Monocoque with a trellis subframe bolted onto the front, discs on all four corners in the late '50s, independent rear. Nic puts it next to what the British were doing in aviation then, the same run that became the E-type. People his age don't care about Jaguar, he says. Slept on. You put somebody in one and they walk away impressed.
Headers sit right in front of the passenger. Exhaust exits on that side too. Intake roar and backfires on the overrun, sidewalls working a road a lane and a half wide. Nic has put people in that seat who wanted out in three miles. Here it flies down Highway One with the fog coming in off the Pacific before a dip into redwoods. Four or five hours in it and it's a peak sports car. Fifteen hours and he doesn't want to see it for three months.
"It's way more fun to go slow and technical than it is fast and perhaps heroic," he says. "You're behind a sport bike windscreen. It's motorcycle loud. You're in the environment."
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