Jaguar F-TYPE Installation Gets Poppy Appeal Makeover
Jaguar Land Rover has unveiled a 35-foot high Jaguar F-TYPE emblazoned with a bespoke poppy design to mark Remembrance Sunday in partnership with Forces’ motorsport charities, Mission Motorsport and the Royal British Legion.
The F-TYPE, clearly visible to motorists on the M6 motorway, fittingly faces the Sentinel sculpture which depicts the Spitfires Castle Bromwich was famous for building during World War Two.
The tribute is the latest in a string of commitments from the company as it aims to become the automotive employer of choice for former Armed Forces personnel.
Jaguar Land Rover has hired over 750 former Service personnel since 2013 and is a Gold Award holder of the Armed Forces Covenant Employer Recognition Scheme, a written and publicised voluntary pledge from businesses and charitable organisations who wish to demonstrate their concrete support for the Armed Forces community. It has welcomed a total of 40 ex-Armed Forces personnel on to its Wounded Injured Sick (WIS) programme since 2014, 25 of whom have found employment with the UK’s largest automotive manufacturer whilst many others have secured roles within the wider supply base.
Understanding and respect
The business is also the headline partner of the annual Invictus Games, an international sporting event to inspire recovery, support rehabilitation and generate a wider understanding and respect for wounded, injured and sick Servicemen, Servicewomen and Veterans.
Mission Motorsport, the Ministry Of Defence’s charitable authority on motorsport for recovery, created a unique poppy-themed livery for the F-TYPE which sits affixed to the outer wall of Jaguar Land Rover’s Castle Bromwich site where the sports car is built.
The design, emblazoned with the words of John McCrae’s poem ‘In Flanders Fields’ written in 1915 in the midst of World War One, was fitted in sitby the charity’s team of ex-Servicemen who were discharged from active Service with physical and mental injuries.
Ex-Servicemen, Lance Corporal Chris Read, Guardsman Chris Walker, Private Dan Elliot and Lance Corporal Francis Stokes, who all benefitted from the work of Mission Motorsport, spent more than three weeks designing the unique livery before fitting it directly to the wall-mounted F-TYPE.
A second F-TYPE SVR was adorned with the poppy design at Mission Motorsport’s workshop in Wantage, Oxfordshire. It will go on a 10-day UK tour in the lead up to Remembrance Sunday, starting at the Royal British
Legion’s Birmingham Poppy Day in Victoria Square on Wednesday 1st November.
From there it makes its way around Jaguar Land Rover sites and Military landmarks such as the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire before arriving in Anglesey to play the role of safety car for Mission Motorsport’s fourth annual 12-hour endurance event, Race of Remembrance.
More:
Jaguar Land Rover
www.jaguarlandrover.com
Mission Motorsport
In its five years of operations, Mission Motorsport has delivered more than 4,000 training days of sport for 1,400 beneficiaries, leading to over 230 placements and over 100 jobs.
www.missionmotorsport.org
Royal British Legion
www.britishlegion.org.uk
