This is the sportiest Jaguar ever
After decades of making luxury cars that
were sporty, Jaguar is back in the sports-car business.
The new F-Type coupe is the spiritual and
mechanical successor to the mighty E-type of 1960s-era schoolboy fantasies and
transportation design student sketchbook aspirations. It is as much fun as any
sports car on the planet. It’s not as flingable going through a corner as a
Porsche Cayman, but neither is it as heavy and belligerent as a Bentley
Continental GT. It’s like a well-screwed-together muscle car that can also turn
and stop.
Offering
a level of refinement, ride quality and aesthetic charm, the F-Type Coupe sets
a benchmark rivals can’t currently match
You already know this car’s sibling, the
F-Type convertible, which came out last spring. That was its own private brand
of topless, sporty delirium. The F-Type coupe takes that and cranks it up to 11
or, rather, to 33,000 Newtons/degree. To make the convertible into a coupe,
Jaguar put an all-aluminum roof on the all-aluminum body and immediately
doubled the car’s torsional rigidity. Engineers were then able to firm up the
continuously adjusting Adaptive Dynamics dampers and add stiffer springs for
better handling. They tacked on Torque Vectoring by Braking (TVbB) to grip the
inside discs in turns and send torque to the outside wheels for quicker, more
stable cornering. The second-generation electronic active differential, which
goes from 0-100 percent lockup in 0.2 second, helps.
The result is the sportiest, most confident
Jaguar ever built for the road. Jaguar brought us to central Spain to find out
for ourselves. The Spanish seem to love building racetracks in remote parts of
their country, and we have been lucky enough to drive on almost all of them.
Hermann Tilke and Pedro de la Rosa designed this one, Motor Land Aragón. It’s
3.32 miles around with 15 turns and a one-plus-mile straightaway. The track
record is 1:41 set by a Red Bull Formula One car.
The
interior designers have created a luxurious, spacious cabin that dresses
advanced acoustic and electronic technologies
The day before, we’d driven Spanish back
roads in an F-Type S V6. Just as with the F-Type convertible, the coupe is
available in two V6 configurations and a V8. The base model’s V6 makes 340
supercharged hp and gets to 60 mph in 5.1 seconds. The supercharged V6 in the
F-Type S is tuned for 380 hp, 339 lb-ft of torque and launches to 60 mph in 4.8
seconds. The S also gets active exhaust, the aforementioned Adaptive Dynamics
and a limited-slip mechanical differential. Underway in the S, we never felt
like the car lacked for power or torque. The exhaust was properly howling under
full throttle, and the car handled almost as adroitly as the more powerful,
more electronically controlled R.
As for the V8-powered R (550 hp, 502 lbft),
it really shines on racetracks. It’s quicker around the Nürburgring than even
the once-mighty XJ220—having lapped the Grüne Hölle in 7:39, a full six seconds
better than the XJ220, making it the fastest production Jaguar ever.
One
reason the F-Type isn't instantly recognizable as a Jaguar is the new taillight
shape, but it's sure to appear on some future models
The R gets to 60 mph in 4.0 seconds, though
we were told that 4.0 is a “very conservative figure.” It also has an
electronic active differential, TVbB and, like the S, can be ordered with
carbon-ceramic matrix brakes, which ours had.
Its adaptive-damping tuning is set up to
work in tandem with the car’s revised spring rates, which are 4.3 percent
stiffer in front and 3.7 percent in the rear.
Earlier, we’d driven an R coupe around an
ancillary road course with sprinklers watering the track to show us how the
TVbB pulled the car around corners. The result was merely weird as the TVbB
tugged the car to the inside of the turns and minimized, but did not eliminate,
understeer.
On the bigger, far more wide-open MotorLand
circuit, the R coupe came into its element.
Motor,
controller and power transmission wires occupy the engine bay
A big roar from the quad-tipped exhausts
announced our exit from the pits as we used the easy and quick paddle shifters
to change up the gears. The shifter was superb, by the way—quick and smooth.
The problem with new technology like TVbB
is that, at first, you start driving as if it’s not there. It takes awhile to
get used to it and awhile longer to rely on it. At one point, overcooking the
car into a sharp lefthander, we got to try out the TVbB. It did, indeed, pull
the car around to the left a little better than we might have ourselves without
the brakes on the inside wheels helping and—swoosh—we were into and through the
corner more quickly.
At
the rear, twin tailpipes further enhance the car's sportiness
Generally, turn-in was smooth and quick. We
left the traction and stability control on for our drive on the big track but
did feel a little slip exiting corners. Switch that stuff off and you can drift
your F-Type around the entire Formula D calendar. Early on, we asked our
co-pilot to switch the steering- and throttle-response settings from sport to
normal, since the quicker setting was too jittery. The car was much easier to
pilot after that, and, ultimately, ours was the fastest time our
co-pilot/instructor had recorded, so we must have been doing something right.
A couple minor quibbles: There was a lot of
road noise transmitted into the cabin, and the seatbacks hit the rear wall too
soon.
Again, minor.
We figure you will be quite pleased once
you get your own F-Type coupe.
