First Edition

PERFECTION DOESN’T always happen straight away. Peel away the top layer of paint from the Mona Lisa, for example, and you’d discover that Leonardo da Vinci reworked his masterpiece several times. And it apparently took Freddie Mercury six years to write Queen’s seminal rock song, Bohemian Rhapsody.

Although it’s well known that the E-type was developed from the Le Mans-winning D-type, there were, in fact, two cars that came before the finished design, bridging the gap to the creation of the world’s most famous car.

Jaguar’s aerodynamicist, Malcolm Sayer, started working on a new sports car in 1956. Making use of his experience in developing the D-type, early drawings show a car that was remarkably similar to the finished article that would arrive five years later. A prototype was soon built in what had been Jaguar’s competitions shop, but, after Jaguar pulled out of racing at the end of the 1956 season, it became known as the experimental department.

In Philip Porter’s Jaguar E-type The Definitive History from 1989, Jaguar metalworker Bob Blake discusses an early conversion he had with Sayer about the car. “Malcolm worked out the precise shape and we got together on the internal construction of it. We sat down and had a good natter about what was the best way to produce the shape and how to build the internal construction – the doors and things like that, which weren’t his speciality. I said, ‘We’ll not weld anything, we’ll rivet.’ We did a lot of spin dimpling and flush riveting. A few rivets were exposed, but they didn’t affect the airflow because the bottom was clean.”

According to Phil Weaver, head of the competitions shop, the car was built “For instance, Les Hayden, who had been first to join me in the competitions shop, originally wanted to alter the front suspension. So he altered it. We didn’t have a drawing for it, but old Len had ideas of what it should be like so we built it, put it on the car and tried it.”