Emil Frey Targeting New Jaguar F-Type GT3

After developing and racing the XK-based Jaguar G3 for the last five years, Emil Frey Racing has laid out plans to debut the new F-Type in GT3 competition, for as early as next year.

Being the oldest importer of Jaguar road cars in the world, the Swiss-based team already had close ties with the now Tata-owned company.

It is known Jaguar has been looking at entering the GT3 market for some time now, and while reports indicated that the project was shelved at the beginning of last year, it now seems a Jaguar F-Type GT3 might be on the cards after all.

Team manager and driver Lorenz Frey confirmed to Sportscar365 that his team is in talks with the manufacturer on the current program and a future project with the F-Type.

“Jaguar is looking at our efforts,” Frey told Sportscar365. “There have been talks, but we’re still a private team.

“For us it’s still a story of David against Goliath, battling against big manufacturers.”

While Frey admitted that the Jaguar’s main focus is on launching its Formula E program at the moment, he didn’t exclude the possibility of a parallel GT3 program.

“We are pushing hard to go one step further with the F-Type,” he said. “Our current car is based on the XK, but we would definitely want to go to the F-Type as soon as possible.

“The time scale depends on the manufacturer, not on us. If we could have started earlier, we would have already been running the F-Type now.

“For me, Jaguar should definitely be in GT racing. This is where they are coming from. It’s their heritage, their Le Mans history.”

While pushing for the F-Type project to go ahead, the team is debuting its second XK G3 chassis in this weekend’s Total 24 Hours of Spa.

The new car, which is sporting the No. 114 this weekend, completed a test day at Paul Ricard earlier this month, followed by a BoP test in order to give SRO data on the car.

Even though there are no visual differences on the outside between both cars and the engine being the same, many small changes have been made under the skin, mainly to improve the maintenance of the car.

Besides the Jaguar program, Emil Frey is also still involved in the development of the Lexus RC F GT3.

“Both projects have a different approach,” Frey said. “We just bring the Lexus to the track and give feedback to TMG on what they can do better.

“All the different developments and knowledge from the U.S., Japan and European teams will be used to build a car that will hopefully be run next year.

“The plan is to be ready to sell the cars next year. We also want to show the potential of the car in other series, not only in VLN.”