A TASTE OF AN ICONIC BIG CAT
There is something so elegant about Jaguar’s E-type. It has style, grace and poise that still turns heads even now, 60 years on from its original release. Our Brands Hatch test day, in early July, wasn’t private, so we shared track time with Legends, Pickups, Mazda MX-5s, even a Trans-Am Ford Mustang – and the pit garages were full of Euro NASCARs, preparing for the coming weekend’s American SpeedFest.
As I trundled up to the pitlane, taking the necessarily circuitous route around the back of the garages from our parking spot in the lower paddock, occasionally having to stop for ambling pedestrians or slow-moving recovery vehicles, I noticed countless NASCAR mechanics, who’d travelled in from Europe, reaching for their smartphones.
This is one of the pure joys of driving special historic racing cars. I recall competing in Simon Hadfield’s ex-Peter Gethin Chevron B37 at the 2012 Silverstone Classic, and the crowds that car drew to the collecting area when I fired her up and revved the engine; the smiles on their faces. It was similar with the E-types. People made signals at me to blip the throttle; they took videos and photos of the cars as they gleamed in the summer sun.
Enzo Ferrari is said to have thought the E-type beautiful when it was first released in 1961, and now I see what he saw, through the joyous faces of these enthralled spectators. Classic cars really are a wonderful thing. Two at a time – well that’s like manna from heaven.
The first and only other time I drove an E-type, at Snetterton in April 2010, I struggled to fit inside the harness and consequently
