Jaguar F-Type R preview
When the F-Type launched last year, the world went crazy. There was this amazing car, a follow up to one of the most beautiful cars ever built, finally here after years of anticipation.
It was brilliant, good looking and delightfully noisy but it wasn’t the car I was waiting for. That would be this, the F-Type Coupe. This was the car that Jaguar conceptualised in 2011 as the CX16. Admittedly the concept was a little bit different the wing mirrors were different, the wheels were different, and the boot was a side hinged glass affair. But at the time it was enough to get tongues wagging about a new E-Type, a new sports car for Jaguar, a brand that really needed one. Because when you used to think about Jaguar there wasn’t really too much to get the pulse racing, and let’s be honest there was the XK which is really nice in a stately way but has now been killed off, the XF which is great if you don’t want a 5 Series and the XJ which well very capable doesn’t really scream ‘drive me kids’. Jaguar make great cars but they are luxurious not visceral. Jaguar needed something to make it appeal to the people who love to drive, to feel the road through their sitting bones, to have their ears blown off with thundering noise. It needed something that would blow all other sports cars out of the water.
Well the F-Type Jaguar now has one, well two the Coupe and the Convertible. And whether you are young or old it has a look that appeals, and I tell you what it really, really does appeal to me. Put it like this, the convertible is like a nice big piece of gooey chocolate cake, but the Coupe is like adding a whole other cake on top of that slice. It simply is that awesome, the roof really completes the look - it’s just staggeringly beautiful. And the way that Jaguar has managed to do this is with its extensive use of aluminium, not only to make it look good but to keep the weight down. However aluminium isn’t the kind of metal that can easily bend into shapes like this, so Jaguar’s engineers had to use some pretty complicated techniques such as triple stamping and cold pressing to create the shape they wanted out of a single sheet of metal. In this case function created form. Its beauty is no surprise. The man behind it Ian Callum has form in creating forms. He designed the XK, the Aston Martin DB9 and many more. On top of that there’s heritage here the XK120, 140, 150 the C,D and E-Types too. There are certainly hints of those in here especially in the back.
As well as being devastatingly beautiful it’s also unsurprisingly pretty quick. There are few engines to choose from all the way from the base F-Type with the 335bhp supercharged 3-litre V6 up to the R. It is the fastest F-Type you can buy. It’s got a 5 litre super charged V8 with 543bhp. It’s also worth noting that the Coupe is incredibly stiff, much more so than the convertible. It’s got a torsional rigidity of 33,000 newton metres per degree and it sounds very complicated. I can’t quite get my head around what all of that means, but in Lehman’s terms it means that this car is very, very stiff which means you can have a lot more fun with it. Let’s start with the basics. When you turn the car on it’s in comfortable, relax mode, the suspension is cosseting. It’s as comfortable on the motorway as it is on a B road but it’s not too extreme. It’s what you’d expect from a big engine comfortable Jag really. It’s everything the XK is but a little bit more as well. Dynamic mode is where it’s at basically it turns everything up to angry. The steering gets a little heavier, the throttle response becomes sharper, the gearbox starts becoming a wannabe racing driver’s best friend. The dampeners stiffen up, the whole thing just tenses up and gets ready to go. But it also gives you a nice safe net, you get a really nice sports car feeling but you can try and fling it around but it won’t let you drive off a cliff or under steer into a hedge, the car will look after you and there are a few reasons for that. There’s active dynamics which does 500 calculations a second to make sure the car’s nice and stable. Then you have a couple of firsts for Jaguar there’s the EAD which is an electric differential, it shuffles the power between the two wheels as and when it’s needed. Also you have something called torque vectoring by breaking which dabs the brakes on the inside wheels just nicely to tuck you in for a nicer cleaner line. It’s very clever and when you’re on it you can properly feel it working. And then adaptive mode also opens up the exhaust so you get the full noise, the full drama and the whole thing is just maddeningly brilliant.
You can of course just turn all of that off and I had a quick go round a track with no safety net and you can get a little bit slidey if you want to but it’s so easy to do as the chassis is so good it’s so easy to manipulate. Even a novice like me can have a little bit of sideways fun and correct it as the steering is so good, the power and everything about it just works.
I was talking with someone about the XK and of course that’s going to be killed and if you drive the two back to back you realise just how far Jaguar has come in just a few short years. This car is nothing short of absolute brilliance. It can’t fail to put a smile on your face. I will admit though when I first got in it and turned all the noise on and we had a little bit of a play, I did find the noise a little bit too much. I thought that maybe they’d gone a little bit too far the bangs, the cracks and the pops are a little bit too much, then I realised I needed to stop being a grown up and start being the kind of child that really enjoys this kind of thing and then it’s perfect, it’s absolutely brilliant. So much drama, so much noise and when you nail it, when you put your foot to the floor, the acceleration is this wonderful linear go. It’s so smooth and so ferocious, it’s rapid, it’s absolutely brilliant. It’s the wonderful way you hear and feel the engine build up and then all of a sudden all hell breaks loose. There’s noise, there’s fire, brimstone, ashes, it’s addictive – especially if you find a tunnel.
I’ve driven this now in pretty much every situation and it’s such an adaptable car. It’s not a dramatic vehicle if you don’t want it to be. I will say one thing about the noise though, as when it’s turned up and all Armageddon is falling out of the back of the car, you can hear it from miles away. Also it did have a minor altercation with the police they heard it before they saw it and politely asked me if I knew what the speed limit was because my car sounded fast. In reality I was just in second gear having a lot of fun. I can’t find anything bad to say about it. This is the car Jaguar really needed to make it a true aspirational, ‘yes I really want a Jag’ car. This is it, Jaguar have done incredibly well here.
The convertible was the car that got the F-Type rolling and it’s one of the loveliest cars to roll out of Jaguar’s gates, but the Coupe adds that little extra something, but it’s something I can’t quite put my finger on. Is it the look, the power, the drive I just don’t know? What I do know is this. The convertible is a staggeringly brilliant good car, but the Coupe is the car that I have been waiting for Jaguar to make for years and I’ll wager it’s the car you’ve been waiting for too.
