Teamspeed First Drive: 2013 Jaguar F-TYPE

And what a beauty it is too. Seriously: new cars can have a habit of hiding their strong shapes and complexity in images. So much is down to how the light plays on the 3D sculpture that 2D just can’t do justice to. So it is with the F-Type. We’re seeing it for the first time away from the show stand, camouflage tape removed, and it looks great.

Chief designer Ian Callum says he didn’t have an E-Type in the design studio because there was no need: we all know what it looks like, he said, all know what the key styling cues are. And so the F-Type pays passing reference to it, most notably in that long clamshell-style bonnet and set-back cockpit, but is never retro. Even the undercut to the rear is forward-looking rather than a pastiche.

You’re thus in a positive frame of mind when you tug the unusual but neat retractable doorhandles (no dirty fingertips here). This is reinforced when you drop down, low down, into well-bolstered and firmly supportive seats. Legs stretch far ahead, the steering wheel’s positioned just so, Jaguar’s most interesting and effective interior design in decades is driver-orientated and utterly charming.

So you press the starter button and the dream that was extinguished when the E-Type died back in 1973 is brought bang back to life.

Which type of F?

There are three flavours of F-Type. In the interests of research, we drove all three. It’s a hard life. There’s nothing hard luck about the basic 340hp 3.0-litre supercharged V6 model, though. If this is the only F-Type you ever drive, you won’t be disappointed. It makes a great noise, all high-tech V6 wail and rude exhaust pipe blare, and has a great slug of torque to ensure performance is easily accessed.

Wring it to the redline and it’s ultimately not quite as fast as you’d wish (despite being made entirely from aluminium, the F-Type still weighs 1600kg) but it’s good enough. It’s entirely uncompromised by using an eight-speed automatic instead of the six-speed manual some yearn for, too: drive this sublime ZF transmission and you shouldn’t want for any other setup. It shifts fast, the paddles are quick-witted and is always both immediate and slack-free.

Next up was the 380hp V6 S. 40hp doesn’t sound a huge jump up but Jaguar hasn’t stopped with just the power boost: the S also gets a limited-slip rear diff, bigger brakes, Adaptive Dynamics suspension – basically, enough to make it much the more focused vehicle. You should be able to sense this just from starting it up, with the noise being decidedly harder and more prominent.

Indeed, the noise from the twin centre-exit exhausts is exceptional, all high-tech howl and splattering on overrun. And unlike the standard V6, its performance doesn’t slightly disappoint either. You have to rev it through but it gives back so much to make this worthwhile, delivering blinding performance and a racecar-like feeling of inertia-free alacrity. You really shouldn’t want for any more; 171mph and 0-62mph in 4.9 seconds is fine, right?

But then there’s the V8. All 5.0-litres and 495hp of it (that’s 115hp more than the V6 S!). This is the animal of the range and sounds it from the moment it explodes into action. This trades the modern, higher-pitched, higher-tech sound effects of the V6 for a far more guttural and gasoline-spitting noise. The deep whap-whap rumble from the quad exhausts will explode very rapidly into the distance too: this is a blindingly fast machine. The 186mph max is limited, 4.2 seconds to 62mph is surely traction-limited.

The jury’s out on whether you can have too much, though. No doubting the V8 is a monster, all surging thrust and tyre-challenging twist. It’s often hard to use it all, though, and you’re often aware on how you are consciously holding yourself back. Far less of that in the V6 S, which can be driven in a way the hold-on-and-hope V8 S can’t deliver. You’ll be happy with either. Just for different reasons. But one, to us, seems to complement the F-Type more naturally than the other…