Aug. 27, 2001, 8:11AM 20 years of elbow grease gets Houston man to finish lineBy MARTY RACINECopyright 2001 Houston Chronicle It's a sleek, aerodynamic machine with long, flowing lines -- a piece of work, the only car to be permanently displayed at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Behold the Jaguar E-type. There weren't many made -- 72,000 compared to 300,000 Corvettes during a 14-year period -- and there aren't many left.
One belongs to a 50-year-old video producer in west Houston. Patrick McLoad's 1966 model is exceptionally rare, one of only 1,182 right-hand (opposite) drive Series 1 E-type roadsters ever manufactured. McLoad was 20 when he and his father found the Jag sitting in a field near NASA. It had 55,000 miles on it. The top leaked and the brakes were iffy. The owner let it go for $800. They towed it home. Patrick's mother, he recalls, was "less than pleased." There was racing history under the hood, or "bonnet." Jaguar had won Le Mans endurance tests in the 1950s with its C- and D-types. That technology went into the E-type, or XKE, designed as an everyday sportscar to compete with Corvette for the American muscle-car market in the 1960s and early '70s. McLoad's vehicle apparently reached Houston through an Air Force officer who bought it in England. After moving here, he sold it to a man who worked at NASA. Like most sports cars, Jaguars are temperamental. They overheat, especially in Houston's climate. They break down. They require TLC. But the "chickmobile" was ideal for a 21-year-old bachelor. And, man, could that beast run. The speedometer topped out at 160 miles per hour. One early Sunday morning when McLoad was young and dumb and bulletproof, he was tooling toward Galveston. The road was deserted. The engine was purring. He punched it up to 155 mph before backing off. "I recall a lot of buffeting and shaking and instability, which is why I decided to back down, because the thought occurred to me that this car could get airborne." McLoad grew up among car enthusiasts. His brother was into Corvettes. His father, Kenneth, was a mechanical engineer who built cars, including a fiberglass sportscar he called the Venus. His creation appeared on the cover of the May 1954 issue of Motor Trend magazine. Patrick, too, built a sports car, a fiberglass job that he installed on a VW Beetle chassis and called the Avenger. It looked pretty cool, like a poor man's Corvette. "Cars defined who you were," he says. "Cars were freedom, art and attitude." McLoad was an aviation electronics technician in the Navy from 1973 to 1976. After his discharge he indulged his "real" passion -- film and video production. He founded McLoad Productions and contracted out to oil and gas companies. He loved all aspects of offshore drilling. "There's nothing like being offshore on a rig. I love the physics involved and the amount of forces they're dealing with. I don't like particularly the idea that they're punching a hole in the Earth and all of the environmental problems that result from it. But just from an engineering standpoint and the physical work that it requires, it's very massive." Four years ago McLoad changed his company to Offshore Films. Great name, lousy timing: The price of oil dropped to $10 a barrel and work in the Gulf came to a halt. McLoad closed his suite of offices and moved his work into the dining room, which really pleased his wife, Marlene. Fortunately, Marlene is managing director for a large insurance brokerage company. Somebody in the family's got to work. Before joining the Navy McLoad took precautions with his Jaguar. He put it up on blocks, drained the fluids and coated the body with wax. Three years later the paint had cracked, the frame had rotted, hydraulic fluid was leaking, the brakes were bad and the interior was shot. Otherwise, it was in mint condition. To repair the frame he'd have to remove the engine, brakes and front suspension. Working in his garage, McLoad didn't stop until he had the car torn apart. By then he decided to restore it completely. It would take him 20 years. First, he took the engine in for an overhaul. The man found a tiny crack in the block too thin to be repaired. McLoad needed a new block. Then he had the body repainted, in signal red. McLoad stripped off the chrome, acid-dipped the car to arrest rusting, applied epoxy primer, and went through three body specialists who were either incompetent or dishonest. One guy sandblasted in the wrong place, another left the car out in the rain. The third guy held onto the car for a full year. When McLoad confronted him, he got the job done in a matter of weeks. The paint looked gorgeous. But there were cost "overruns." With the car safely in his possession, McLoad redid the suspension and rear end (or "boot"). He put in new shocks, tires and wheels, striving for historical accuracy, such as exact duplicates of 1966 Dunlop tires and Dayton wheels with stainless steel spokes and knockoff spinners. An Austin specialist installed a new black interior. McLoad replaced the exhaust system and replaced or resleeved linkage rods, brake calipers, hydraulic lines and cylinders in stainless steel. Every piece of chrome was rechromed. "There's not been a single part, nut or bolt that has not been off this car," he says. "It's either been replated, repainted or replaced." In the past 20 years, McLoad has gotten married, had children, changed companies and bought a new home. The constant was that Jaguar staring back in various stages of repair. McLoad completed his restoration last month. In late July he entered the car in the Jaguar Clubs of North America Challenge Championship in Franklin, Tenn. At such shows up to 100 points are awarded for historical accuracy and aesthetics. Over the course of a year an entrant's three highest scores are averaged to determine a national winner in each class. The judges, who rate everything from the mechanics to the interior and body, don't exactly whip out magnifying glasses, but they're persnickity. McLoad faced stiff competition. "These big (collectors) have a lot of money and full-time guys to take care of their cars. Me, I'm just kind of an average Joe who has taken awhile." So when he took the Jag out of the trailer in the motel parking lot the night before competition, it still wasn't what you'd call ready. It had no seats, no carpeting, no headlights. Jaguar Club members from Houston, Austin and San Antonio worked on it until 2 a.m. Even then, the judges had no problem subtracting fractions of points. The bonnet did not fit properly, a wiper blade was the wrong model, the foot pedals didn't have rubber sheathing, rubber booties were missing from the distributor cap, hose clips and some bolts and hydraulic hoses were not historically correct. McLoad received 98.2 points, finishing eighth out of nine contestants in his class. He beat somebody. After 20 years, he'll take it.
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