E-Type (two-seat bodies)

The E-Type: Jaguar's Sensation at Geneva

On 15 March 1961, Jaguar rolled a low, long-nosed car onto its stand at the Geneva Motor Show, and a crush formed around it. William Lyons had produced in the E-type a shape that made seasoned motor-show attendees stop mid-aisle. Two weeks later, Jaguar repeated the unveiling at New York's International Automobile Show, where over 300,000 people are reported to have filed past the display. It is one of the most persistently repeated stories in automotive history that Enzo Ferrari, on seeing it, called the E-type 'the most beautiful car ever made.' That claim deserves care: no contemporaneous recording or public statement supports it, and the earliest known written attribution appears in a 1988 biography by Gino Rancati, published after Ferrari's own death, sourced to secondhand recollection. Whatever Ferrari did or did not say, the E-type did not need borrowed praise.

The car's mechanical foundation was inherited and refined rather than new. The 3.8-litre triple-SU version of Jaguar's twin-cam XK straight-six, a direct descendant of the engine powering the XK120 through XK150 and, in racing tune, the C-type and D-type, sat under a bonnet whose length existed mostly to house it elegantly. Jaguar offered two body styles at launch: an open two-seater and a fixed-head coupe, both riding a chassis whose independent rear suspension was a genuine technical step beyond the live rear axle common even on cars costing several times the E-type's price. Malcolm Sayer, who had shaped the D-type's aerodynamic bodywork using slide-rule calculations rather than a wind tunnel, applied the same discipline to the E-type's skin.

Jaguar tested that competition pedigree directly. In 1963, working with American privateer Briggs Cunningham and with quiet factory support, Jaguar built a run of Lightweight E-types (twelve were completed of a planned eighteen), using more extensive aluminium bodywork and an alloy-block 3.8-litre engine tuned to roughly 293bhp. These cars, sometimes nicknamed 'GTO killers' for their intended rivalry with Ferrari's 250 GTO, are recorded under a separate race-only provenance, distinct from the roadsters and coupes reaching ordinary dealers.

The E-type's early running changes were driven overwhelmingly by its most important market. By 1964 Jaguar had grown the engine to 4.2 litres, torque rose from 240 to 283 lb-ft, and an all-synchromesh gearbox replaced the ageing Moss unit. In March 1966 Jaguar added a longer-wheelbase 2+2 coupe with genuine rear seats and an automatic option; that four-seat variant sits outside this account deliberately, rather than being folded into the two-seat E-type's story or production figures.

The more consequential pressure came from Washington. Late-production 1967-68 US-market cars, informally called 'Series 1.5' by enthusiasts, dropped the glass headlamp covers for exposed, regulation-compliant lamps ahead of the formal Series 2 changeover, and 4.2 engines lost their triple SU carburettors for twin Zenith-Strombergs on US emissions rules. Rather than build a divergent US-specification car, Jaguar applied most of these changes worldwide with the 1968 Series 2: open headlamps moved forward, a larger grille improved cooling, wraparound bumpers answered impact-safety rules.

That pressure culminated in the Series 3, introduced June 1971 with Jaguar's new 5.3-litre V12, a significant decision since a smooth, high-displacement engine was one of the few ways a low-volume manufacturer could satisfy tightening American emissions rules without gutting performance. The Series 3 dropped the short-wheelbase two-seat fixed-head coupe altogether, leaving a 2+2 coupe and a roadster, both built on the longer wheelbase and floorpan the 2+2 had introduced in 1966. This is a boundary nuance worth stating plainly rather than smoothing over. Coupe production ended August 1973, roadster June 1974, closing a model whose thirteen years carried Jaguar from a Geneva sensation to a V12-powered survivor that outlasted most of its 1961 rivals.

A note on scope: body-style-level figures exclude the 2+2, since the article covers the two-seat E-type only. A note on production figures: series totals come from Wikipedia's Jaguar E-Type article, and body-style figures from the chassis-number catalog at xkedata.com and the Eagle E-Types model guide.

Published chassis-number breakdowns allow the two-seat cars to be counted separately for two of the three Series: Series 2's 18,808-unit total splits cleanly into 8,627 open two-seaters, 4,855 fixed-head coupes, and 5,326 2+2s, while Series 3's 15,287-unit total, already effectively two-seat-only once the short coupe was dropped, resolves into 7,990 roadsters against 7,297 2+2 coupes on the shared long-wheelbase floorpan. Series 1's own body-style ledger, spanning the 3.8, 4.2, and transitional 'Series 1.5' sub-periods, accounts for 36,670 open two-seaters and fixed-head coupes combined, which is 1,742 short of that Series' bundled 38,412-unit total; the difference implies roughly 1,742 2+2s, while another figure of 3,616 Series 1 2+2s also circulates.

Malcolm Sayer's Method: A Shape Calculated, Not Sculpted

Where William Lyons styled the XK120 by eye, the E-type's shape came from an entirely different discipline. Malcolm Sayer, who had spent years as an aerodynamicist at the Bristol Aeroplane Company before joining Jaguar, derived the car's curves using logarithms and custom mathematical formulae, working through a slide rule and seven-figure log tables to calculate coordinates for the body's surfaces rather than sketching them freehand. Those coordinates were then transferred to paper, board or aluminium, and panel-beaters shaped the skin to match. It was, in effect, an analogue precursor to the computer-aided design software that would later automate the same process.

Sayer tested his calculations directly rather than simply trusting them. He took a standard racing E-type, a Ferrari 250 GTO and Jaguar's special Low Drag E-type to the MIRA wind tunnel for comparative runs, attaching wool tufts to the bodywork so he could photograph and study how air actually moved across each car. Even so, biographers describe him as regarding the wind tunnel less as a design tool than as a check on work a competent mathematician ought already to have gotten right on paper. That was an unusual stance for an aerodynamicist of his era, and a point of contrast with Lyons's purely visual approach to the XK cars a decade earlier.

The Lightweight's Racing Season

The Lightweight E-type's competition record extended well beyond its 'GTO killer' nickname. At the Sebring 12 Hours in March 1963, the first two purpose-built cars reached the grid for team owners Briggs Cunningham and Kjell Qvale: Bruce McLaren and Walt Hansgen finished 8th overall and 2nd in class for Cunningham, while Ed Leslie and Frank Morrill took 7th overall and a class win for Qvale.

Le Mans in June 1963 was a harder proving ground. Cunningham entered three Lightweights with quiet factory support; the car shared by Bob Grossman and Cunningham himself finished 9th overall and 2nd in class, but the other two cars fared far worse. One retired after roughly an hour with gearbox trouble, and the third crashed after six hours in an accident that killed Brazilian co-driver Christian 'Bino' Heins; co-driver Roy Salvadori, whose safety harness had not been fully done up, was thrown clear through the rear window and survived with serious injuries.

The Lightweight fared far better on home ground. In 1963's British short-circuit races, Graham Hill won at Snetterton, Goodwood and Silverstone, where the E-type's 3.8-litre straight-six torque let it out-accelerate Ferrari's smaller-displacement 250 GTO V12 out of tight corners. That made for a genuine, repeatedly demonstrated rivalry between the two marques rather than a nickname alone.

The Shaguar: the E-type's Life on Screen

The E-type's best-known screen role has nothing to do with Bond. A Union Jack-liveried 1967 roadster, nicknamed the 'Shaguar' by its production crew, appeared in all three Austin Powers films: International Man of Mystery (1997), The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999) and Goldmember (2002). The same physical car was used throughout the series' run as a deliberate caricature of swinging-sixties British style. It later turned up in the music video for Madonna's 'Beautiful Stranger', recorded for The Spy Who Shagged Me's soundtrack, extending its cultural footprint beyond the films that made it famous.