F-type coupe
All set to launched next year as a 2015 model is the long-awaited fixed-head coupe version of Jaguar’s F-type. The new coupe variant has been spied undergoing testing at Nu¨rburgring. The production version is expected to offer the same line-up of V6 and V8 engines as the convertible, as well as an entry-point turbocharged fourcylinder version. the long, twin-nostrilled bonnet.
‘‘Nascar meets Nurburgring’’ a neighbour said when describing what the R8 sounded like in anger – not offensively loud you understand, but marvellously mellow, as if being heard from a distance rather than in ear-splitting proximity.
Of course, once the exhaust is switched to ‘‘serious’’ (my term, not Holden’s) the sound better matches the blurred trackside scenery. You’ll click into the mid four-second area for the zero to meaningless sprint (100kmh), but you’d hardly believe it.
That’s because this finishingschool trained new R8 is so restrained in its expression of speed, and that acreage of cosy Alcantara must be absorbing so much clamour, because it didn’t completely reach my old ears.
I like the HSVs in this new mellow mode. Like a black-belt holder, it doesn’t have to prove everything, all the time, and it’s a perverse joy to just allow idiots who do like to try it on, to just squeal away into the distance, while the R8 goes where it wants to go at its own refined pace. The police car following them is icing on the cake.
That’s not to say the big R8 doesn’t enjoy nuzzling apexes and cocking its tail with the best of them, it’s just that when you spend the thick end of $105k on a car, doing such things on public roads is daft and potentially dangerous.
It’s an agile and talkative car, with steering – despite its electric assistance – that transmits all the right messages to the driver so that as the engine’s urge chimes in to convert the initial front-end wash-out into tail-biased fun, you feel the transition through your hands. Such communication is all part of the package with HSVs, and with such confidence as a result, the car tends to shrink around you, as all good performance machines should. A bonus is that despite all that wide, sticky low-profile rubber, the car’s pliant ride is not going to shake your teeth out. In fact, at one time the only way HSV could make a car ride like this was to give it magnetic ride. The R8 is a full 68kg lighter than its predecessor, so it’s no wonder that its bigger new brakes, which measure 367mm diameter front and rear and are gripped by four-piston callipers, haul it down from speed in one immense shape-shifting, skitter-free, hanging frontal squat.
Retardation is smooth and progressive and once you’ve experienced a couple of crash stops, you realise that you’re unlikely to outdrive these brakes. Well, you will if you’re only of my skill level.
strap-
On the way home from the track – in that nice long-legged lolloping mode again – the R8 straightens its tie and lowers its voice to that erstwhile mellifluous tone and makes way for the car’s sound system and communications set-up. You can match up your smart phone with the car before even leaving the car park, and if there’s one given for modern Australian car-makers, it’s the fact that the only thing they do better than air conditioning, is sound systems.
And thus it is with the R8, with a Bose audio that makes you feel you’re right there with the orchestra.
The R8’s embedded Pandora and Sticher apps can work through your phone using Holden’s MyLink set-up with no fiddling, so as well as all your con- tacts, you have access to all your musical preferences.
As I left the gates, I asked for Days Like This from Van Morrison. Perfect for the drive home.
An impressive car, even at the price, my special equipment HSV is all the more impressive when compared with similarly sized and equally powerful European offerings which cost twice as much.
It had been more than two and a half years since I’d been allocated an HSV model. On February 22, 2011 I was due to pick a yellow GTS model from Blackwell Motors on Madras St Christchurch. I never drove that car, as on that date of course, the CTV building opposite collapsed and took the lives of a few dozen friends and others away from us. Days Like This indeed.