Yahoo Autos Jaguar F-Type 2024 long-term test
Why we ran it: To find out if cars like the F-Type have had their time
Month 3 - Month 2 - Month 1 - Specs
Life with a Jaguar F-Type: Month 3
They don’t make ’em like this any more – or soon won’t. Are we sorry to see it go? - 7 February
This feels like much more than the usual kind of goodbye, when a long-term test car simply goes off to its next owner, to be replaced by something else relevant, and all's right with the world.
The big grey V8 coupé that recently drove off down the road from my house, and disappeared around the corner for the last time, represented a kind of Jaguar motoring that won't be available again, at least not in a new condition from a Jaguar showroom.
Jaguar is in the process of ending sales of combustion-engined cars forever, and the F-Type R I've driven for 6500 miles is the last of its type.
When the consequences are as large as this, rather than worrying about the usual niggles - a bit of road noise and an ill-fitting glovebox lid - you find yourself thinking of the things that won't be coming again. And in this case, it's two singular properties of the F-Type R: the very special powertrain and the (to me) even more special mechanical layout.
Powertrain first. If you've ever read a line about the F-Type V8, you'll know what we think of it - a huge, smooth, elastic power unit with the capability of hurling a pretty large coupé from standstill to 62mph in just 3.5sec, on towards a 186mph top speed.
Vital in this - given that most of this performance is nowadays available from a £25,000 second-hand Tesla - is the way the performance is delivered: with an exhaust note that starts off seeming rather subdued (even with the special sportiness button well and truly pressed) but becomes supremely and deliciously vocal if you can find the road to give it a lot of revs and a wide throttle opening.
Such things are accompanied by massive and usually illegal speed, though, so like many with this much poke, you need a track to exercise it fully. Good thing the chassis - still one of the now-retired chassis guru Mike Cross's best - is well and truly up to the job, as are the comparatively massive tyres (hence the road noise).
The gearbox is something we will miss too. The mathematical precision with which it deploys 516lb it of torque, whether cruising or sprinting, is something to savour.
True, your potent EV powertrain of the premium, Taycan-ish kind that's coming to replace the F-Type R's motive power, doesn't need either gears or the racket of combustion to go just as fast, but the Jag's way of doing things (which already has a bit of a classic tinge) will always be something to look back on and love.
Harder to move on from, however, will be the long-nosed and low F-Type coupé layout with its low-as-a-snake's-armpit driving position, which allowed your bum to be just a few inches above the road and from which you sighted over the top of the steering wheel rim and straight down the air-scooped bennet. le dyntion, these nose-heavy, arrow-like stability.
The much-praised packaging flexibility of next-generation EVs, even sporty ones, will almost certainly lift the driving position above that of an F-Type by 75-100mm (in other words, a mile) to get a massive battery under the car.
The nose won't need to be as long or capacious so the driver and passenger will move frontwards (the vaunted 'forward control' layout designers talk about) and the proportions that made the Jaguar E-Type will be gone.
This F-Type was not the perfect car, of course. With its seat in the right position, it required you to look for intersection traffic around hefty windscreen pillars whose base was as wide as a tree trunk.
Given its family car length, it wasn't very package-efficient, and its 1780kg kerb weight was a lot for a two-seater, even if it is bound to be at least 500kg shy of the car that will replace it.
Not that there will be one in the short term: all the signs from the all-change Jaguar of 2025 are that sports cars will be off the agenda except, almost certainly, in the artful words of ad campaigns.
However, it wouldn't be right to allow this particular 'goodbye' to turn into too much of a lament. A cursory hunt for nearly new V8-engined F-Types in the classifieds turns up around 40 possibles at prices from £80,000, and many of them have been recently discounted.
Cars like this will be available for many years, and the factors that discourage you from using an F-Type as a daily driver (visibility, size, width) will keep low-milers relatively common.
Still, it's a very, very big moment for Jaguar, to summarily drop a model that so directly embodies its avowed brand values as the F-Type R. And it builds as high as the sky our expectations of the models coming to replace it.
Second Opinion
It’s hard to believe cars like this won’t be prominent in future showrooms. The best thing about the F-Type R is the obvious care that has gone into its dynamic development – you enjoy it every mile. Cars like this will come to represent our era and eventually be highly sought after second-hand. M
Mark Tisshaw
Love it:
Evocative layout Long-nosed two-seat coupés like this embody the sports GT as we’ve known it. It isn’t part of Jag’s future.
Stirring powertrain Huge, smooth, flexible V8 supplies pace and engagement. Eight-speed paddle gearbox is a fine feature too
Superb styling Maybe the original F-Type’s shape has more character, but long nose, haunches, tail still make a great car.
Long-distance comfort Road noise apart, the F-Type has every attribute needed to be a great cross-Europe GT.
Loathe it:
Road noise Very large tyres and the body’s big box sections allow road noise to be high. Others do this better.
Final mileage: 6940
You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone? We do, actually - 17 January
We're moving rapidly towards the end of our relationship, the F-Type and I. There's about a fortnight to go, and already the regrets are starting to pile up.
Chief among them is the fact that I never used the car for a long, raking trip down through France - to take in the Schlumpf collection we've often meant to revisit on the country's far eastern side, or to spear down the Atlantic coast to La Rochelle, where we've had happy times in the past.
It's something both my missus and I would like to have done. Mechanically speaking, the car lends itself to such exploits.
But the best I've managed in nearly three months' ownership has been a pair of trips to the Lake District - one weekend in a hotel we like near Windermere; one business trip to the launch of the BYD Seal at M-Sport's HQ near Cockermouth. Both were significant.
The missus and I have dubious memories of a similar northerly trip in an early F-Type soon after the coupé model was launched (it must have been around 2015) when we discovered that the road noise at a brisk motorway cruise was simply too great and too oppressive for conversation.
We had to resort to earplugs and sign language to make our progress comfortable. We put it down to reverberations in the box sections of the car's aluminium body, evidently not yet stuffed with foam as manufacturers of road-noisy cars are apt to do.
This time, heading two-up to Windermere, the car wasn't quiet, but it was quieter. The road noise was still a subject of conversation and there wasn't much question of listening to the detail of any music from the hi-fi, but it was tolerable.
When I set off for M-Sport on my own a couple of weeks later, mostly listening to sporting podcasts and football commentaries at high volume, as I sometimes do on my own, it wasn't a problem.
It proved what I've often known: that as a driver, you're much less concerned about a car's comfort flaws when you're travelling on your own than when you're travelling with a discerning passenger.
Thinking about this, it strikes me that this susceptibility of the F-Type, which makes it more fatiguing over distance than my own (much smaller and cheaper) aluminium Alpine A110 coupé, is about to be a thing of the past.
The EVs of this size and potential we're now driving tend to have very substantial skateboard chassis beneath their cabins, with batteries that add insulation, rigidity and damping.
What F-Type people are going to miss most is the exhaust note, which can be quelled or enhanced by a switch. Even in the loudest setting, it needs to be used hard to be really vocal, to an extent that's barely possible on public roads.
Which raises another regret: I never managed to do a track day in this car, even though its power, stability, weight distribution and clever torque deployment all promised a good deal.
I did enjoy a few encouraging near full-house interludes, though, (on circuits) and I'd encourage any owner not to miss a much more extensive exploration of this part of the car's capabilities.
Foibles it has, but I'd say the only flaw that has truly bothered me is poor visibility - especially if you adopt the bum-on-floor seat adjustment that makes it work so well in other ways. As things stand, there are a couple of weeks left, and I intend to enjoy them.
This £111,000 old-school Jag was never meant to be a shrinking violet, and it isn't.
Love it
A layout to saviour
It will get much harder in the EV era to own a very low car with a long bonnet and short boot, which positions you to feel yaw motions more precisely than usual.
Loathe it
That road noise
It’s not as bad as it used to be, and can be offset by the exhaust note of the V8 on song, but it’s likely to be more intrusive than in Jaguars of the future. Buyer beware!
Mileage: 6262
Not many cars have the aura of an F-Type - 10 January
My time with our F-Type R coupé will sadly soon be over. What I will miss instantly is the always present sense of occasion built into the car, not just because of its power and mechanical specification but also because of its sensational driving position. I’m not talking mere seat comfort but where and how you’re located in the car. There are very few like it.
Mileage: 6040
