The third-time-lucky Big Cat that roared to Le Mans victory

Competing in - and winning - the Le Mans 24 Hours truly explores the very definition of the word "endurance".

Drivers must endure interrupted, sparse sleep patterns to persist around the La Sarthe circuit with hawk-like focus. Mechanics must endure a diet of coffee and chocolate bars and make any ad-hoc fixes to cars - which, itself, must endure an entire day of uninterrupted running and lashings of punishment from the rotating cast of drivers piloting it.

In 1988, Jaguar's XJR-9 endured. Throughout the dying stages of the 56th edition of the race, the gearbox was on the precipice of shaking itself to pieces. Undeterred, Jan Lammers wrestled his ailing car across the line - just under half-a-lap clear of the #17 Porsche 962C - to the delight of the British fans, who had made the pilgrimage across the Channel to deprive themselves of sleep.

Maybe, in a parallel universe, Jaguar would have already claimed a Le Mans victory in the previous year's festivities - but that year, the Big Cat didn't quite get the rub of the green with gearbox issues. Regardless, 1987's XJR-8 was a fantastic car; so much so, it won the World Sportscar Championship at an absolute canter, and earned Autosport's Car of the Year award for its efforts in the process. It's up to you, dear reader, which one of those accolades is most valuable.

Run by the vastly successful Tom Walkinshaw Racing entity, arguably in its pomp, the Jaguar project was dressed in a regal white, purple and gold combination courtesy of cigarette brand Silk Cut. Wearing the same clothes, the XJR-9 was an evolution of its forebear. Its DNA was, crucially, the same - penned by ex-Lotus, Shadow and Arrows Formula 1 designer Tony Southgate, Jaguar stuck to its roots and continued to use the bored-out V12 road-car engine, which had underpinned the XJR family of cars since 1985.

"It started off at six litres," Southgate explains, "but we gradually bored it out to seven litres. The best engine was a seven-litre one; we did have a 7.4-litre as well. Basically, if you had seven litres it'd go up to 700 horsepower, at 6.5 litres you had 650bhp and so on, and the 7.4-litre had 740 horsepower. It's just a single cam to valve engine, that's the amazing thing.

"But it was very big and heavy, which was a major problem for me, controlling it; the weight is all lumped [in the back]. It dominates the car when you're going in and out of corners. So we had to be very, very careful on weight distribution and centre of gravity.

"So the engine was actually recessed right into the fuel tank, right by the driver's shoulder in effect, to get the weight far forward because otherwise it would dominate the car too much. As it did, it did dominate the car, but it was actually acceptable and drivers could deal with it and it worked."

The Jaguar had also enjoyed some attention to its aerodynamics, and once again had two different kits designed for the full WSC season - the 'sprint'-type bodywork, developed for the regular cast of races, and the Le Mans configuration, which was stripped of drag to ensure the seven-litre Jaguar engine could stretch its legs on the Mulsanne Straight.

"Being a Le Mans car, obviously the aerodynamics are super important because we were frequently doing 240mph on the straight," says Southgate. "And this is every lap. It's not just like a once in a while - every lap, we're doing 240mph.

"So aerodynamics were the primary objective to get right. [In the] Le Mans configuration, you'd have a different nose splitter. A few details too, the louvres would disappear, the wing would be a bit different, so the emphasis was purely on aero."

That splitter was shorter compared to the sprint package, as the need for pure, unadulterated downforce was significantly tempered by the greater desire for less drag. As for those louvres, the underfloor of the XJR-9 was pared back to a simple pair of Venturi tunnels, which let the air fan out into the diffuser at the back. With the underbody creating enough downforce, the rear wing was trimmed out to a single element to further reduce the impact on the car's straightline speed.

But over the XJR-8, which ran with the bare minimum of bodywork in its Le Mans guise, the XJR-9 retained the sprint-configuration wheel covers for the 1988 edition of the race.

Even with its quintet of cars, Jaguar was outnumbered by the sheer quantity of Porsche 962Cs on the entry list. With their twin-turbo flat-six engines, the Porsches were able to turn up the boost in qualifying to overcome the naturally-aspirated V12 XJR-9s, and flanked the top three places on the timesheets

It made sense on two fronts - firstly, the covers slashed the amount of rear-end drag churned out by the exposed rear wheels, ensuring the XJR-9 was a far more slippery prospect once bombing down the colossal straight. But secondly, when tasked with the corners, the drivers had the downforce necessary to give them the requisite confidence in taking them at higher speeds. Southgate estimates that the wheel covers added about 10% extra downforce to the car.

"One of the obvious things you can see on the car, that I didn't notice on most cars, was the fact that rear wheels were always run covered up and closed in," he says. "That yielded up to 10% more downforce, which is dramatic if you took those off; the driver could feel the difference. It certainly wasn't there for the ride or just a pretty picture type of thing - it serves a purpose.

"The only snag is of course, when you do a wheel change, which we did 32 of, I think, in Le Mans in those days. When you did a wheel change you have to take those panels off. So we had to devise clips that the mechanics could get off quite easily and not distract too much from the wheel change. They weren't too happy with it, but it worked!"

With those features all wrapped up in a rather beefy monocoque, the XJR-9 set out to do what its predecessor could not - win the Le Mans 24 Hours. But there was, of course, one weak link - once more, the gearbox had to be carefully nursed through the entire course of the race.

"The gearbox is always a weak link," Southgate adds, "because they were old-fashioned manual gear changes, five speed gearbox called a crash gearbox. So they take a lot of punishment, and in 3000 kilometres of driving, the gearbox has a very, very hard time. And so it was always fingers-crossed with the gearbox."

Lammers recalled in a 2008 interview with Marshall Pruett: "We all agreed that we wouldn't finish the race, and that was because the gearbox broke. That's why we started the race bearing that in mind; therefore, every gearshift had to be as if you were given points for it."

Jaguar set out on its quest of winning Le Mans with a five-pronged attack: Martin Brundle and John Nielsen occupied the #1 car, Lammers shared the #2 with ex-Lotus F1 driver Johnny Dumfries and endurance rookie Andy Wallace, while the part-time #3 entry consisted of 1987 WSC drivers' champion Raul Boesel, four-time Le Mans winner Henri Pescarolo, and John Watson. The two IMSA entries - also using the XJR-9 after TWR took over the Daytona project - featured an all-American trio of Danny Sullivan, Davy Jones and Price Cobb in one car, with Kevin Cogan, Derek Daly, and Larry Perkins in the other.

Even with its quintet of cars, Jaguar was outnumbered by the sheer quantity of Porsche 962Cs on the entry list. With their twin-turbo flat-six engines, the Porsches were able to turn up the boost in qualifying to overcome the naturally-aspirated V12 XJR-9s, and flanked the top three places on the timesheets. Hans-Joachim Stuck was comfortably fastest to put him, Klaus Ludwig and Derek Bell on pole, while Jaguar's best effort was fourth quickest, courtesy of Brundle and Nielsen's car.

But Lammers, assuming the first shift in the #2 car, drove like a man possessed in the opening laps, rising from sixth. Frank Jelinski, in one of the Joest-run Porsches, was first to be put to the sword, followed by Nielsen's Jaguar. Lammers continued to swashbuckle his way to the front, clearing the Mario, Michael and John Andretti-occupied #19 Porsche in short order before later putting a move on Bob Wollek, on early duties in the #18, at the Indianapolis corner.

Seemingly glued to the back of leader Stuck in the following corners, Lammers snatched past on the next lap on the exit of the Mulsanne corner, grasping control of the race in the early stages. But, despite the positional play of a snooker champion, Lammers' opening-lap manoeuvring didn't win Jaguar the race - but his delicate approach managing the gearbox arguably did.

Deep into the race, Boesel was behind the wheel of the #3 Jaguar before his transmission called it a day. Later, when recalling the symptoms to Lammers between stints, the Dutchman was alarmed by the similar ailments that his car was imbued with. In his final flourish, Lammers shoved the gear selector into fourth and left it there, lest the gearbox buckle under the load of a final gearshift.

PLUS: The disaster lurking behind Jaguar's 1988 Le Mans win

Having to navigate the straights and corners in a single gear was gruelling. While the Bell/Stuck/Ludwig Porsche was slowly homing in, Lammers somehow managed to hang on, easing out of the final chicane and across the line, accosted by a tremendously proportioned crowd. Jaguar, against the odds, had pulled a famous victory out of the hat while perched on the cusp of a mechanical retirement.

In the garage, where the floor was presumably littered with bitten fingernails, the Jaguar team was jubilant - although the torture of the final laps meant it took a while to settle in.

"[My initial feeling was] relief!" Southgate recalls. "It was our third attempt, the two previous attempts with the XJR series of cars; we'd had various failures, engine failures or gearbox failures, things like that, and third-time lucky I suppose you'd say.

"Before the race I remember John Egan, the boss of Jaguar, said 'we are going to win this race, aren't we?' Which is a tricky question to get from the boss of Jaguar! And you just say 'Oh, yeah, yes, of course. We hope so.' And we did. I mean, basically you've just got to keep going."

In 1988, Jaguar's experience of the Le Mans 24 Hours was truly one of endurance. The team endured, toiled, tired and fought - and it left the La Sarthe circuit with the greatest reward of all: victory.