Facing up to the future
EvEn thE Jaguar team struggled to make too much fuss about the facelifted F-type. New design boss Julian Thomson was candid, to say the least, at the launch event in Portugal as he talked the press through the cosmetics. ‘The changes for the new car have been quite minimal, really,’ he said. ‘We haven’t had to do too much to it.’
Fortunately, not doing too much included leaving that glorious tail – ‘the strongest feature of the car’ according to Thomson – alone, but the front has had a course of steroids to give it a matching sense of aggression. The headlights, too, have been given the evil-eye treatment thanks to advances in tech that allow a slimline look previously unachievable. In two deft strokes, the Jaguar design team has consigned the ‘too friendly’ face of the F-type to history. Possibly a bit rich coming from the man that gave us the cute S1 Elise.
If you were feeling sorry for Thomson in having little to say, spare a thought for vehicle integration manager Tanmay Dube. He talked us through specs, the switchable active exhaust system, the fact that the V8s have a quiet mode to prevent upsetting the neighbours (oh, the shame), and the news that the apparently crucial Apple CarPlay and Android Auto are now standard, and that in ‘sport dynamic’ mode you can have a gearshift indicator in the ‘12.3in-tall high-definition reconfigurable cluster’.
What you really need to know is that there are three models, ranging from the 2.0-litre, fourcylinder turbo P300 at 300bhp (the light motor giving it excellent weight distribution and superb agility) to the bestial F-type R, packing a 5.0-litre supercharged V8 and offering 575bhp. The R has wider Pirellis, an uprated chassis and suspension, recalibrated steering and huge dollops of look at me… and listen to me.
Of the three that we tested over the sinuous mountain courses and long sweeping valley roads between Porto and Lisbon, Octane was most taken with the middle option, the rear-wheel-drive P450. Hosting a tamer version of the blown V8 in the more feral R (still capable of getting you to 60mph from standstill in under 4.5sec, as opposed to 3.5sec), it requires a little more driver input than its track-ready stablemate when you want to hit the higher numbers. That’s because the eight-speed auto dives a bit into higher gears if you leave it to its own devices.
Unlike the R, though, it also has the option to be as civilised as you like when you are not playing or posing. For the cross-continental, early middle-aged touring peppered with occasional assaults on the
Alps that is the raison d’être of this GT ( Jaguar still calls it a sports car, but they did that with the E-type, too), nothing in this range does all the jobs better and seems quite as focused in all of them.
However, were there no P450, the sometimes underwhelming Ingenium four could also do the job pretty well. Yes, that rorty V8 is probably unnecessary, but how much longer will we be accorded such pleasures? And where else can you grab such performance at such market-busting prices? The four-pot starts at under £55k, the R at under £100k. In that sense, if nothing else, these cars really do evoke the spirit of the E-type.
From top
Visual changes are minimal, except at nose; editor Elliott enjoys this century’s E-type equivalent; Jaguar likes to link style of old and new.