adminNEW YORK. — Jaguar’s last real sports car, the E-Type, was released in 1961.
A two-door, two-seat coupe and convertible, it is often considered the sexiest car ever made. Fantasise about a Jag and it’s that low-slung hood and high hips that are sizzling in your mind.
The follow-up, the two-door, two-seat F-Type, has just gone on sale, a delay bordering on intransigence. It was high time for an E-Type for this era.
The new F-Type roadster isn’t sex on wheels, but it is a rip-roaring sports car. The company knows it, too, setting up a test drive for car journalists on a nasty racetrack with devastating altitude drops and brutish bends. Now that’s confidence.
On my, say, 15th lap, I would memorise the blind crests and hard braking points and learned to trust that the car was going to get me through them. Pushing the US$92 000 F-Type hard, brake pads burning acrid smoke, I’d come to believe.
This rear-wheeled wild thing winds up to 160 kilometres per hour in a finger-snap. Flick your eyes to the digital speedometer and there’s a three-digit number flashing back at you — climbing (170), climbing (180), climbing (190!). On the racetrack, speed is only limited by good sense.
That super propellant is the result of the 5.0-litre, supercharged V-8, an engine which gives truth to the name “powerplant” Just shy of 500 horsepower, it’s a raging, howling thing lodged in the nose. A steady stream of firecrackers sound off in the four tailpipes when you let up the accelerator suddenly, excess gas burning violently off.
Jaguar engineers wanted to give the F-Type personality and the engine and exhaust notes are the most successful embodiments of that. This is a bad boy, just shy of rude, but certainly not mean.
The V-8 model should be nose heavy, but the chassis is sweetly tuned, the Pirelli tyres grippy and the power delivery potent but not ridiculous. Slipping through tight, tricky turns, the F-Type goes onto the balls of its feet, lighter than you’d expect, very nearly balletic.
The F-Type could have been a British version of the Mercedes-Benz SL convertible, a rich man’s toy which isn’t meant to be played with very hard. To its greatest credit, it is far, far better than that. Its agility is equally welcome on fast mountain roads. — Bloomberg.
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