My driver is unperturbed, but I can't stop giggling. We blast past ordinary traffic just to watch soccer (football? cricket?) moms swerve as they get hit with the C's wash. I begin to laugh uncontrollably, the car bounding down the road in manly, angry leaps.
We pass a bus stop, gargling and crackling along in third, and two grade-school kids waiting there look at me like I'm wearing a hat made of Margaret Thatcher's face.īecause my driver is a nice man, a kind man, a gentle man, he does this repeatedly, and I cannot stop grinning. There's a hole in the floor where I can see the pavement whiz by. Bare aluminum and painted steel tubes fill the cockpit a short, stubby gear lever pokes out of the center console, and a cereal-bowl-sized tach and speedometer live in front of the driver. We pootle around, careful to not lug the engine, as the coolant warms. I am not allowed to drive the car myself because A) it is owned by the British people, and I am not one of them, and B) it's worth more money than I make in ten years. "We're going to have to let it warm up a bit," shouts my driver. Your ears, bludgeoned by three-and-a-half liters of mid-century British explosion, simply give up and refuse to hear anything else. When a C lights off, the world goes out of focus. A short, stubby pipe pokes out of the car's left rocker panel, roughly two-and-a-half feet below the passenger's - all C-Types are right-hand drive - ear, and if it has any muffling baffles in it at all, you wouldn't know it. Here's the thing about a C-Type's muffler: It doesn't exist. On a cloudy day in Gaydon, England, at Jaguar's proving-ground test track, I sat passenger while a white-haired British man woke the beast.
One of those cars, British registration number NDU 289, was XK-120C chassis 45. As part of Jag's 75th anniversary celebration (the company marks its founding as 1935, the first year the Jaguar name was used on a production vehicle), the cats from Coventry hauled out a few of the cars housed in the nonprofit, state-owned Jaguar Daimler Heritage Trust. And impossibly, almost heartbreakingly beautiful. It is a study in contradictions: Sexy but brutish, lithe but masculine, simple yet complex. This is the Mona Lisa's arched smile, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, and the Sistene Chapel rendered in hand-crafted aluminum. To stand in front of a C-Type and gaze into its undulating curves and fluid, muscular haunches is to gaze at a masterpiece. This is one of the most beautiful things ever built. What we have here is not just one of the most beautiful cars ever built.
Judicious tuning bumped power from the 120's 160 hp to around 200 hp - later C-Types would produce as much as 260 - and, free of carpets, a windshield, or other creature comforts, weight dropped to around 2100 pounds. If Sayer's name sounds familiar, it's because he would later pen Jaguar's legendary D-Type, E-Type, XJ-13 and XJ-S. The driveline was shoehorned into a tubular steel frame, and everything was cloaked in a Malcom Sayer-designed, hand-beaten aluminum body. The four-speed transmission, independent torsion-bar front suspension, and 3.4-liter, twin-cam straight six were borrowed from the XK-120. Over the next decade, Jaguar would win Le Mans five times.Īs racing cars go, the C-Type's guts were relatively ordinary. Three C-Types started the French endurance classic in 1951, and while only one finished, it did so in first place, a whopping 77 miles ahead of the next closest car. The tube-framed pinup that appeared on the Le Mans grid one year later was dubbed the XK-120C, for Competition, or C-Type for short. Starting with little more than an XK-120's driveline and a clean sheet of paper, Heynes drew a tour de force. The car is the closest thing we will ever create to something that is alive.