In March this year, motor sport lost one of its great characters. Bob Tullius – founder of Group 44, scourge of the Corvettes and the man who put Jaguar back on the winners’ rostrum in America – died peacefully at his home in Florida on 16 March, aged 95. White cars, green stripes, immaculate preparation: that was Group 44 – and the most famous car they ever raced was a certain V12 E-type.
Group 44’s E-type at speed in its white-over-green Quaker State livery
6,000 E-types with nowhere to go
By 1974 the E-type was out of date, the oil crisis was biting, and Jaguar’s importer in America had a staggering 6,000 of them with nowhere to go. Mike Dale’s answer was racing: SCCA Class B Production. Two teams were hired – Huffaker of California for the West Coast, Group 44 of Virginia for the East, Tullius and Brian Fuerstenau’s outfit, founded in 1965 and already good for ten national championships with Triumphs and MGs.
Both cars debuted on 10 August 1974. Huffaker’s E-type, driven by Lee Mueller, won its first race out at Seattle. At Watkins Glen the same day, Tullius had annihilated the entire field until the gearlever came off in his hand with three laps to run. From there the Corvettes barely got a look-in: three more wins for Mueller, five for Tullius. But at the end-of-season run-off at Road Atlanta the Huffaker car dropped away, Bob’s tyres wilted, and a Corvette snuck through by less than a second.
Victory lane: Group 44’s crew celebrate aboard the number 44 E-type
There would be no such slip-ups in 1975. This time both coasts cleaned up, and at the run-off Tullius won outright to take the national crown. When the E-type’s racing career ended, this very car had started 17 races and won 12 of them – Tullius’s engineers having coaxed around 440bhp from the 5.3-litre V12, up from the standard 270, while the car stayed production-based. It may not have been Le Mans. But Jaguar was racing again. And winning.
What it’s like to drive
Chassis UE1S/24250 now lives with the Jaguar Daimler Heritage Trust. The door is welded shut, so you climb over the side and drop into a tiny seat behind an even tinier wheel. The dash is sparse, but the car is simple: flick a switch, press a button, take cover and go. There’s a four-speed Jaguar gearbox borrowed from the 4.2-litre E-type for its closer ratios, and a kind clutch.
The signature every Group 44 car carried
The steering is so light you’d think it broken. The engine is fabulous, though: hard pull from 2,500rpm, entirely on its cam by 3,500 – Tullius used 7,000. It weighs about as much as a family hatchback and carries far more power than a modern 911 GTS, yet turns in cleanly, understeering gently until you break the rear loose. Only the brakes wilt after a few laps – just as they did on the tighter American tracks of the seventies.
Andrew Frankel drove this car for Motor Sport’s Jaguar Heroes special in 2023 and came away calling it “a pure and simple delight”. The idle alone earned its own line: “a 12-bore shotgun at the point of discharge, sampled and repeated ad infinitum. And that’s just at idle.”
Under the bonnet: the 5.3-litre V12
The man behind the 44
Bob Tullius was a Kodak salesman who bought his wife a Triumph TR3 in 1960; she rarely drove it, so he took it to racing school himself and won the graduation race. Group 44 got its name on a motel napkin at Sebring, and the “44” stayed with him for life – sometimes applied backwards after his wife once cut a numeral the wrong way round. His immaculate white cars gained a green stripe when Quaker State came on board; the team took 14 SCCA national championships and three Trans Am titles, and in 1984 his XJR-5s carried Jaguar back to Le Mans after 27 years away, winning their class there in 1985.
Bob Tullius with the Group 44 E-type
Honours followed – the SCCA Hall of Fame, the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America, the Trans Am Hall of Fame in 2025 – and he’d have waved most of them away. “I was only an OK driver,” he said, “but I had a great team. And an OK driver with a great team was good enough to get the job done.”
White over green: the Group 44 E-type
Why it matters to us
Because it proves what we have always believed about the Jaguar V12: prepare it properly and there is nothing it cannot do. The engine nobody rated in 1974 was winning championships within a year – the same story we tell at Building The Legend, from re-creating the XJ13 to the tera quad-cam V12 we build today at our workshop in Royal Leamington Spa, close to Coventry, and the Classic Workshop where we keep our customers’ cars true to that standard.
Rest in peace, Bob. Thank you for proving the point.