French for "Team Scotland", Ecurie Ecosse was a private motor racing team founded in 1952 by Edinburgh businessman and racing driver David Murray and mechanic Wilkie Wilkinson. Its most notable achievement was winning both the 1956 and the 1957 Le Mans 24 Hours endurance race. For a private team, this is considered an achievement of colossal proportions! Also, a lesser known fact about Ecurie Ecosse, is that the team had also raced in three Formula 1 races. The Ecurie Ecosse cars were always distinctive in their beautiful Scottish Flag Blue paint finish.
The 1956 Le Mans & The Victory
For the 1956 season, Jaguar again fielded a team of technically improved D-types. The cars had to meet new regulations framed in the aftermath of the tragic 1955 Le Mans accident. These were aimed at slowing things down! The new cars had to have full-width windshields to start with; this raised frontal area by 13 percent, to 14.5 square feet. Malcolm Sayer though, the bright designer that he was, cleverly continued an innovative clear plastic over the top of the passenger's seat, making a transparent roof that minimized drag on that side! Another mandated "slow-the-cars" rule for 1956 was an upper displacement limit of 2.5 liters for prototypes, which caused a number of manufacturers not to participate that year. The D-types, however, qualified as "production" because quite a few had already been produced and sold. Thus, they had the largest engines, and were comfortably fastest in practice. About the only opposition within reach of the factory Jaguars were the Aston Martins, which had been allowed to keep their 3.0-liter sixes, and of course, some privately entered D-types!
Jaguar's list of opponents on that year should have included itself! On only the second lap for example, running in the rain, a team driver crashed in the Esses; the resulting melee took out a second factory car. Shortly afterwards, the Hawthorn/Bueb D-type began to misfire, and lost a lot of time in the pits while the problem was traced to a cracked fuel injector pipe.
The day was saved by the leading privateer team, Scotland's venerable Ecurie Ecosse, car No. 4. Though not quite as technically up-to-date as the factory's British Racing Green machines, this single Scottish Flag Blue D-type was fast enough to pull away from a battle with the Astons. After 24 long and immensely tense hours, Ron Flockhart and Ninian Sanderson brought home another winner for Coventry. The straggling survivor of the factory team wound up sixth!
A Legal Technicality, The Saltire
The Scottish Flag, also known as The Saltire, or The St. Andrews Cross, required special permission of use by The Royal Banner of Scotland's Lion Rampant. The Ecurie Ecosse shield, which featured The Saltire design, had no definite permission of use. Some insider rumors had it that Ecurie Ecosse used to prepare their cars without applying their shield on the flanks of their cars. As soon as they crossed the border to France, the first thing they did was to proudly place the team shield on their racing cars!... Exoto XS item RLG88004D is the UK version, and item RLG88004 is the full fledged (non-UK) Le Mans racing variant!
