To many people, the E-type Roadster with a hard-top fitted is just stunningly beautiful. They are pure sculpture.

With the original E-types available as just two models, the Roadster and the Fixed Head Coupe, we now tend to forget that owners fitted a hardtop to the open versions in the winter. Jaguar thought the variation important enough to devote a full page of the original brochure to a roadster with the hard-top fitted.

We have now remanufactured these hard-tops for the Series 1 and Series 2 cars (3.8 and 4.2 litre-engined E-types). They are an exact reproduction of the original ones produced by Jaguar, including double skin fibre glass, Perspex rear window, chrome-plated brass mouldings, cantrail and body seals. Click here for more information on the CMC remanufactured E-type hard-tops.

With very little time to spare, we completed the substantial repairs to the famous 7 Days and 7 Nights XK 120, which is part of the Jaguar Heritage collection, in time for the recent Goodwood Revival meeting, where it was displayed outside the Earls Court re-creation in the paddock.

Originally the XK was used by Jaguar's legendary Engineering Director, Bill Heynes, as his road car. However, when Jaguar decided to take a 120 to the banked Montlhéry track, just outside Paris, for a spot of record breaking, they used this car, the second right hand drive example built. Pye provided a radio so the drivers could keep in touch with the rudimentary pits.

Among the four drivers was a young Stirling Moss who remembers it well and thinks the feat of covering over 16,000 miles non-stop for seven days was quite something for a road car. He recalls that the track was very bumpy, just to add to the challenge.

To alleviate the boredom, Moss and his fellow drivers Jack Fairman, Leslie Johnson and Bert Hadley, played all sorts of tricks on each other. One got on top of another's shoulders and they wrapped an enormous tarpaulin round them like a very large cape, added a cone to his head and appeared in the darkness on the edge of the banking!

When the E-type was only a couple of months old and it was absolutely impossible to get one in the UK, the Daily Mail newspaper ran a competition to win one. In fact, they had two as prizes. One of those cars is currently in our workshops undergoing a full restoration. We will keep you posted.

A very rare XKSS is currently in our workshops for a little light repair work to the bodywork. Only 16 were made by Jaguar before the famous factory fire in 1957 supposedly put paid to any more being built as vital jigs were lost.

As the XKSS was basically a D-type with a full width windscreen, grafted on bumpers blades which would be copied for the E-type, a passenger door, luggage rack and soft top, the XKSS was very much the supercar of its age – and rather rarer than most supercars.

A few years ago, we rebuilt one of the most famous of the works D-types, OKV 1, and this car is often in the workshops for race preparation. So, we are no strangers to genuine D-types.