It might be that we’re getting old, or spending too much time in inferior cabins of late: but car interiors really seem to matter to us of late. Of course, out favourite interiors are usually direct analogues of our favourite all-round motors. But every now and then, there comes along a cabin that outstrips the quality of the car.
The 458’s super high tech contruction is reflected perfectly in its display. It might seem illogical to some, but we’ll take the progression for chance to drive the future.
On a more classic note the lounge of the Volvo p1800 smacked of Euro bohemianism. And we like that very much.
The Jag XJS interior, on the other hand, was a rakish piece of leather and walnut that was directly of its time and place.
One of our all-time faves was The Citroen SM’s vision of the techno future.
In the year that Jaguar celebrates its 75th anniversary, we thought it would be fitting to spend some time with some of the new Jags that have been making such an impact.
Designer Ian Callum certainly knows how to pen a beautiful creation. When we travelled up to the lakes earlier this year in his stunning XFR, we fell in a rich, bounteous sort of lust. With the five litre, V8 supercharged motor and brilliantly adaptive traction control, the XFR was like a football hooligan dressed as a Guards Officer. And that is a good thing.
At the moment, we’re three days in with some beautiful time with the New XJ. Three hundred and fifty miles and only half a tank of diesel in, we have to say it is every bit as impressive as its shorter, slightly more aggressive cousin. The engine pulls beautifully right through the range, and the car handles like a much smaller specimen, especially with ‘dynamic’ mode engaged. It eats up motorway miles in the most gracious and comfortable manner imaginable — and the cabin and ICE is second to none in quality. Having recently done the same thing in an E Class Benz, there’s no comparison. The XJ feels like a car you really want to be with — while the Merc seems like a marriage of practical convenience.
This Jag is so good that our road companion and partner-in-life said during our elegant waft from London to Bath that ‘she didn’t want the journey to end’.
Stay tuned for a fully fleshed out feature on Jag’s new dawn online and in the forthcoming print ‘zine..
PS: The XJ is a pretty car, but not quite as luscious as our favourite English car: the XJ 13…
For us, the question of what is the sexiest, coolest, most beautiful sports car ever to be produced out of these islands is an easy one to answer. The Jaguar XKSS, of course.
Produced in 1957 in the Browns Lane Jaguar factory in Coventry, it is basically a road-going version of the mighty and beautiful racing D type. Whichever way you look at it, that would be cool enough credentials.
But the XK SS was more than a simple recreation of a racing legend. It was if fact produced and exported to the US as the apotheosis the British Sports Car. Canny Jag figurehead Sir William Lyons realised that it was in America where the derivative would find its most successful market.
Thus way back in 1957, when Elvis was thrusting his pelvis all over America and the world, we Brits sent our most beautiful cultural creation in the XKSS. It was a bridgehead that predated by a half dozen years the British invasion that arrived with the Beatles.
So while the XKSS played somewhat of a clichéd role of a cultured but dashing Brit for the yanks, it’s reality was rooted in genuine racing success. If it was selling the image of itself, therefore, to the highest bidder, it was an image that every Brit could be proud.
There wasn’t that much physically to do to convert the basic D-Type to a road-going monster of desire. You added a side passenger door. You removed the aerodynamic fin behind the driver’s seat, thereby creating that gorgeously curved, clean rear three quarters that was echoed in its successor the E-Type.
Chrome bumpers fore and aft were also prescient of the popular XK-E, and of course a full suite of safety glass as well as a simple foldaway hood was included in the package.
The car was powered the same straight six engine of that appeared in the D-Type. There were disc brakes all round and that aeronautically inspired achingly beautiful monocoque was all you needed to convince that to own an XKSS was to buy directly into the racing heritage of the Jaguar badge.
There’s a cat-eyed, snub-nosed sort of design perfection to the body that retains a functional integrity that was wrought in the white heat of WW11. Malcolm Sayer had hammered out the D-Type’s curves initially. Sayer had gone on to design Jag’s other rare superstar the XJ 13 – as well as the perennial divider of design opinion, the XJS. Enable to express his self at last with that new monocoque form, the Aeronautical designer’s application of aerodynamic principle to the D-Types body helped it reach untold speeds along the Mulsanne Straight.
Just sixteen examples of the XKSS were produced and sold before a fire in Jag’s factory destroyed the remaining D-Type chassis. A couple of hundred waiting customers’ loss resulted, and glory for the lucky 16.
Oh yes. Steve Mcqueen, of course, owned one. Nuff said. Again.
Portuguese artist Miguel Palma is fascinated by technology and the way that it affects people’s lives. So when he found his 1963 Jaguar Mark Ten in his native Lisbon, a natural curiosity about the graceful beauty’s lineage led him to create his latest exhibition, which is currently showing at Coventry’s Warwick Arts Centre.
Inspired by the Jag’s weighty charisma, the artist decided to trace the car’s journey from its birthplace in the Coventry Jaguar factory to a dealership in Paris and eventually into the hands of the owner of France’s biggest chocolate factory.
The Chez Wonka connection is just one interesting byway down which the Jag has driven — the exhibition includes Palma’s drawings about cars and technology as well as archive material from the Jaguar Daimler Heritage Centre in Browns Lane, Coventry. There is also film of the car’s journey back home to the West Midlands, where it forms part of the Heritage Centre’s collection in its own right.
And it seems to makes sense to us. Truly classic cars have a tons of charisma, the sort of panache that is manifest when passionate and creative design is crossed with a rich life-history.
Why shouldn’t the stories of cars, their owners’ lives and the complexity of that connection be discussed in the same way as, say, a painting or a static sculpture?
And over the years various shots of legends of music, screen and stage have been photographed with their ride of choice. Each has added something to each’s image.
Here’s our latest selection of interesting cars and their significant others.
The perfect illustration (below) of the glorious absurdity of the very, very fast car. The Bugatti Veyron will do 253 miles per hour. But it can’t do 253 miles in an hour, because at that speed its fuel consumption is so voracious that it will drain its tank after just fifty miles. You’ll have covered the distance from London to Brighton in twelve minutes, but stopping for petrol five times for every hour’s driving might get to be a drag.
The Veyron is not alone, of course. The 200mph car is probably a complete chimaera; to our knowledge, nobody has ever tried to drive a production car at 200 miles per hour, for an hour. Almost all the cars that make the claim would need to be towing an oil tanker to do it, and that would knock their speed a little.
Veyron: a brilliant absurdity
And it’s all academic anyway. The combination of circumstances that allow you to do a really big speed in a road car are so rare as to make the proportion of very fast cars that have actually been driven at very fast speeds incalculably small. Forget the law: you’re almost certainly going to have to break it. The real problem is distance. Plainly, as a car’s speed increases, its rate of acceleration declines; you might get from zero to sixty in three-and-a-bit seconds, but getting from 190mph to the double-ton might take a minute as your car reaches the very limit of its abilities. Finding a road sufficiently long and straight and clear is almost impossible, and finding the nerve is even harder.
So why are we so hung up on top speed? Once, there was a genuine engineering benefit; the advances that made cars go faster, such as aerodynamics and more efficient engines, and stay stable and stop again, such as better brakes and suspension, filtered down to ordinary cars. That’s no longer the case; we’ve learnt pretty much all we’re going to learn, and the extra few miles per hour that now make a car the fastest in the world are eked out with extreme engine tuning and otherwise utterly impractical aero and suspension settings.
The Veyron did bring some benefits. Ferdinand Piech, the Sauron-like mastermind behind the Volkswagen group used the project as a trial-by-fire for aspiring engineers; if they could hit the almost impossible targets he set for the car – 400km/h, 1001 horsepower, one million euros – their careers were assured, and they’re now working on the Polos and Golfs the rest of us drive. But more often, being cajoled into doing a huge speed makes a car worse in normal driving. Off the record, Bentley engineers admit that making the Continental GT do 200mph left it hopelessly overspecified and overweight at a crushing 2.4 tonnes.
Over Specced and superfast: The Bentley Continental GT Speed
But even if you don’t actually want it, and never get the chance to use it, a big top speed appeals to anyone who ever played Top Trumps as a kid. It sells cars, and it sometimes prompts even the most revered of carmakers to massage the figures a little. A car’s top speed can be calculated with a fairly simple equation, making it easy to disprove some of the more ludicrous claims. You only need a car’s power, frontal area, drag coefficient and rolling resistance to work out how fast it will go with the right conditions and gearing.
But the really striking thing is the relationship between speed and power. To make a car go faster, the extra power required is proportional to the cube of the extra speed. Put simply, to make a 180mph car do 200mph – a speed increase of 11 per cent – you need 37 per cent more power. It’s difficult, expensive, and much easier to fib.
Could this car really breach a ton-fifty?
The pre-production Jaguar E-Type that became the first road car to hit 150mph in 1961 almost certainly had a little help from the competition department; subsequent tests couldn’t replicate it. The Ferrari F40 was the first credible production car to claim a top speed over 200mph, boasting of 201.3mph at its launch in 1987, but to our knowledge this has never been independently verified. Maximum respect to Porsche for eschewing Italian willy-waving and NOT claiming 200mph for its 959, launched at the same time as the F40. It would have been a killer marketing line, but Porsche knew it wasn’t true. It claimed 197mph instead, and that’s exactly what the 959 did in an independent test.
In the same month that Ferrari made its 200mph claim for the F40, Phil Hill and Paul Frere timed the Ruf CTR ‘Yellowbird’ at 211mph for US magazine Road and Track, and it did 213mph the following year at Nardo. The CTR – Ruf’s reworking of the Porsche 911 Turbo – was made in small numbers compared to the 1315 F40s built but it still qualifies as a production car, Ruf having been granted manufacturer status by the German government six years previously. This tiny, bespoke carmaker beat the best in the world to make the first production car to prove it could do 200mph.
Ferrari was caught out again with the F50: it claimed 202mph, but the lease under which all 349 were sold specifically forbade independent speed tests; when a US mag finally managed to test one it did ‘only’ 194mph. Ferrari learnt its lesson; the Enzo will do all of its claimed 218mph.
The Enzo Ferrari lived up to its noble moniker
The Jaguar XJ220 and McLaren F1 posted genuine big numbers, but needed a little help. In ’92 the Jag had to have its catalysts removed to produce the extra 50bhp Martin Brundle needed to lift it from 210 to 217mph at the Nardo test track in Italy, or just over 220mph once the scrub effect of the high-speed bowl has been allowed for. Cue mass exhalation in Coventry; the car (just) lived up to its name. The McLaren F1 in which Andy Wallace set the long-standing 240.1mph record in 1998 needed its rev limiter removed to do it, though rumours still abound that the engine was ‘special’.
All these cars are extraordinary, covetable, engineering marvels. But perhaps our obsession with top speed is passing. There may never be another car like the Veyron: global recession, emissions regulations, social opprobrium and dwindling oil supplies mean we’ll have to get our kicks elsewhere, and the new technologies that replace the internal combustion engine might simply be incapable of propelling a car that fast. But do you really care that the all-electric Tesla Roadster will do ‘only’ 125mph, when you’ll seldom get close to that in normal driving, and its acceleration to 100mph is so – well – electrifying, and produced with zero emissions or guilt?
