Jaguar XJ220 "Martini" GT, Italian GT championship 1993 (part 1)

After the setback I experienced with the Ferrari F430 I decided that I would start (or at least select) another kit from my stack to get my spirits up.
And the kit I selected is the Jaguar XJ220 from Tamiya (kitno. 24129).
But I won't be building the street version of this car. While checking out some on-line stores looking for after market parts for this kit I stumbled upon a decalset by scaleproduction.de on the MediaMix Hobby internet site.
With this decalset it was possible to make the Martini-sponsored GT Racing car of the Jaguar XJ220. And that is the end of it really. I was instantly hooked. Any car looks great in Martini-livery and especially this one. So the decision was quickly taken to try and build the Martini-sponsored version of this car.
I ordered the decalset from MediaMix (while Scaleproduction didn't have them anymore) and ordered the required BBS wheels directly from Scaleproduction.

I was ready to build.
Or wasn't I ? The few reference pictures provided with the decalsheet were nice for deciding where the decals should go. But what about the interior or the engineroom ?
The engineroom wasn't that important, but I surely couldn't leave the interior like the streetversion of this car.
But everywhere I looked, no pictures (or incredibly small ones) to be found.
Until a few weeks ago. While searching, once more, for pictures on this car, Google directed me to a Canon photography forum. And what do you know ? There were some excellent pictures all of a sudden.
It appeared that a Jaguar dealer in England had had this GT Racing Jaguar on display and a member of this forum (Tim Dunlop to be precise) had taken some pictures of the car.
I decided to contact Mr. Dunlop and he kindly provided me with a link to his webpage where more pictures were to be found.
Finally I had some useful pictures for building this car, and that is what I intend to do in this Build Report.

First I'll show a picture of how this build should turn out. All the pictures of the real car in this thread were taken by Tim Dunlop.

What's in the box ?
Next I'll show a few pictures of what's in the box:

The clear parts aren't featured in those pictures. I've left them inside their plastic bag to protect them against scratches from handling. I'll take them out of the bag when I'll use them.

Next are a few pictures of the after market parts I'm going to use on this kit:

Now that I've presented my newest project, there's only one thing left to do: Start the project.
But the start of the project will be for the next update.