Jaguar F-Type Project 7 & Land Rover Defender Classic

The Project 7 began life as a one-off concept revealed at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in July 2013 — a single-seat F-TYPE roadster with a sawn-down windscreen, a fairing behind the driver's headrest, and Ecurie Ecosse blue paintwork. The design was an explicit homage to the 1954 Jaguar D-Type, which won Le Mans three times (1955, 1956, 1957). Public reception at Goodwood was strong enough that Jaguar's then-new Special Vehicle Operations division committed to a 250-unit production run, building the production cars at Browns Lane, Coventry through 2014 and 2015.

The production specification kept the targa-style fairing and the truncated windscreen but added a passenger seat for road legality. The drivetrain was the 5.0-litre supercharged AJ-V8 from the F-TYPE R, tuned to 575 PS (567 bhp / 423 kW) — at the time the most powerful production Jaguar ever sold — driving the rear wheels through an eight-speed Quickshift automatic. Performance: 0–60 mph in 3.8 seconds, top speed 186 mph (electronically limited). UK list price was £135,000; all 250 examples sold rapidly, with deliveries running through 2015 into early 2016.

The Project 7 is significant beyond its specification. It was the first production car badged by Jaguar Special Vehicle Operations — the in-house division that would go on to build the XE SV Project 8, the C-X75 stunt cars for Spectre, and the bespoke Land Rover Defender V8 Works builds. Project 7 is therefore the founding object of the modern JLR halo programme, which is exactly why LEGO®'s dual-set choice makes sense: the Defender Classic, in its final post-2012 life under JLR, was the other side of the same Special-Operations halo strategy.

The Defender Classic — the LEGO® set's billing — covers the run of the Land Rover model line that wore the 'Defender' name plate from 1990 to January 2016. The lineage runs deeper than that, of course: the design is a direct evolution of the Series I launched in 1948 at the Amsterdam Motor Show, through Series II (1958), Series III (1971), and the 'Ninety' / 'One Ten' (1983, the first coil-sprung Land Rover), with the 'Defender' nameplate formally applied from the 1990 model year onward to distinguish the line from the new Discovery.

77264's Defender is the pickup (Ute) configuration — a tray-back body variant of the Classic Defender. The Ute body was produced across the 90, 110 and 130 wheelbases for working applications: utility companies, farm and forestry use, military variants, and the Australian and South African markets where 'Ute' is the dominant local name for a pickup. LEGO®'s choice is unusual for Speed Champions, which has historically reserved its catalogue for road and race cars. The Defender Ute is only the second pickup body ever produced in Speed Champions; the first was the 75875 Ford F-150 Raptor & Ford Model A Hot Rod (2018), a 6-stud-era dual set retired by 2020.

The final Classic Defenders rolled off the Solihull production line on 29 January 2016, ending a 68-year continuous production run for the basic Land Rover shape. A redesigned Defender (project code L663) returned in 2020 as a modern off-roader; 77264 explicitly markets the older 'Classic' shape, not the L663. The Defender's significance is harder to summarise than the Project 7's — it is the British Army's basic off-road vehicle, the Royal Family's farm transport, the canonical aid-agency 4x4, the basis for Camel Trophy and a hundred other expedition builds. For LEGO®'s pairing purposes, the Defender Classic Ute earns its place alongside the Project 7 as the brand's heritage anchor.