Tata Motors’ UK luxury car unit, Jaguar, on Friday confirmed the F-type, its completely new aluminium two-seater sports car, will make its global debut in production form at the Paris show on 27 September.
The much-teased roadster has already had considerable attention from enthusiast media while driveable prototypes have been shown to the public and journalists.
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Jaguar Cars’ global brand director, Adrian Hallmark, said: “The unveiling in Paris will be a truly significant day in Jaguar’s history as it will mark the company’s return to the sports car market, a market it originally helped to create.
“As its sporting forebears [XK-series, D- racer and E-type roadster/coupe] did in their era, the F-type will break new ground by delivering stunning sports car performance while vividly demonstrating [our] cutting-edge engineering technologies and world-class design excellence. The next step in Jaguar’s sporting bloodline is about to become reality.”
The model line will be launched as a convertible with a choice of three petrol engines: 340PS and 380PS versions of Jaguar’s new three-litre supercharged V6, and a new derivative of its existing supercharged five-litre V8. All will drive the rear wheels through an eight-speed transmission and will have stop/start.
Prototype testing
Following the F-TYPE’s ‘camouflaged’ public drive at the Goodwood Festival of Speed here in England last June, testing of the final verification prototypes has continued in some of the harshest environments in the world.
Jaguar said the test programme is designed to verify the “staggering” amount of design work that was carried out by Jaguar’s engineers in its in-house ‘virtual world’, a process in which the automaker claims industry leadership.
Over 0.5m separate design analyses were carried out comprising 10m CPU hours of processing, creating more than 300TB of data. Had that same amount of initial design analysis been completed on physical cars, in the pre-computer design era, the number of prototype built would have been in the thousands – impractical.
Engineers are currently concentrating on honing the performance of the physical verification prototypes to ensure the production car meets expectations.
Vehicle line director Iand Hoban said: “We’re really pleased how the attributes have translated from the virtual simulation work we’ve done into the physical world.
“Now, we’re refining and adding those last few percentage points… which will turn a great sports car into an exceptional one.”
Tweets such as this from a British Car? magazine – “Jaguar confirms the F-type for Paris, which raises the excitement levels in the What Car? office” – suggest the queue to test that claim is already forming.
