Design and Specifications Car Jaguar F

Design Car Jaguar  F

Hamlin, West Virginia, is nowhere. Which is exactly the place Jaguar sports-car development has been for the past 40 years.

The XK? That, good sir, is a GT. That anything small and uncompromisingly sporty could or would grow in the sizable shadow of the E-type has long seemed impossible, what with Jaguar’s spasmodic management over the decades. Yet here is the 2014 Jaguar  F-type, a proper two-seater with a folding fabric roof whose ancestral link to that last great Jaguar roadster is its audaciousness of spirit as much as its naming convention.

Fashioned primarily from aluminum, as were some Es, the F-type’s lightweight metal is welded, riveted, and bonded for the unibody and cast for the suspension, with huge sheets of it stamped and wrapped tightly around the supercharged engine.

Our F-type V-8 S is thoroughly modern; this part of West Virginia, not so much. A town of 1100, Hamlin sits along Route 3, some 35 miles west of the capitol in Charleston. The closest hotel room is in Hurricane, 20 twisting miles north through the hills.

For the first couple of miles, the patches and pockmarks on Upper Mud River Road are rough enough to tell us everything we need to know about the F-type’s ride quality: It’s good. The independent suspension with adaptive shocks is always firm and the car corners flatly, yet we never find ourselves crashing over the barklike surface.

Engine Jaguar  F

Specifications

VEHICLE TYPE: front-engine, rear-wheel-drive, 2-passenger, 2-door roadster

ENGINE TYPE: supercharged and intercooled V-8, aluminum block and heads

Displacement: 305 cu in, 5000 cc

Power: 495 hp @ 6500 rpm

Torque: 460 lb-ft @ 2500 rpm

TRANSMISSION: 8-speed automatic with manual shifting mode

DIMENSIONS:

Wheelbase: 103.2 in

Length: 176.0 in

Width: 75.7 in Height: 51.5 in

Curb weight: 3974 lb