That's part of it. the delightful 'bouquet' of an un-restored, never-been-retrimmed Jaguar interior of this vintage; this one with black leather interior. (A tan or red leather dye would, even after all this time, smell quite differently.) Top up or down, Tara, with her untouched seats & carpets and just 65,000, fully original miles from new, just smells RIGHT.

A little bit of unburned gas & fumes, a little bit of burning, clean Castrol GTX dripping onto something hot, somewhere, mixing (esp roofless) with road dust & the smell of the pine forest - that's part of the cleansing joy that is our day out today.

A 1970 Series 2 4.2 liter Roadster, chrome wire wheels with correct non-eared spinners in the centre. Of course the correct & original brass wheel spinner removal tool, jack & bag in the trunk and - oh, so important here in the Golden State - both original 1970 blue & gold 3 digit California license plates still current from issue, new, in 1970. Though the pristine front plate is currently unmounted.

So how does she drive?

Beautifully.

Amazingly.

And, being a correct & very low mileage car, tight. "As a drum."

She just had both front wheel bearings replaced by Steve Hill ( Finest ex-pat Jag/MG/Porsche mechanic West Of Scunthorpe,) with original Quentin Hazel parts from XKS Unlimited. It worked. What a difference. Certainly no power steering - that was an option on E-types by '70 but thankfully never standardized & seldom specified until the radically revised & heavier Series 3 V-12 cars of mid-1971 superseded the lighter six, & PAS was really needed - but

here we have just splendidly direct, correctly geared & weighted, responsive & sensitive control & feedback through the original (of course) 3 spoke alloy wood-rimmed wheel.

(If you've got an E & it's lost the wheel, repro units are available & pretty much essential - the correct wheel radius is crucial.)

The car is, put simply, Quick. US markets saw the lower 3.77 ratio back end, which amongst British cognoscenti has, along with US spec twin Strombergs, fitted on the Series 2 from '68 on, (UK & Europe had 3 SU carbs to the glorious finish of the six) been derided & despised. Yes, it makes for much higher freeway cruising rpm & consequently more stress, wear & fuel consumption. But it makes the 4.2 Jag just SPRINT all the way up to - well, it's not my car, she's 36 years old, I'm not going to go TOO fast.. . I didn't ever do more than - 70? ... It's very hard to say. The speedometer has movement typical of old Jags from bygone days. It wobbles so much as to be close to worthless. We'll fix that in due course. But in traffic the Strombergs & gearing give it this sprinter personality. Shifting in & out of traffic lanes, in town & on the freeway, there is nothing akin to lag. You press the pedal, the car goes faster. 'Mind the Gap' in the traffic lanes because as soon as you think about speeding up to slot in, the Jag is there. With 4.2 liters of twin cam six, it's about the same displacement &, I'm guessing here, weight of engine, as my six pot Wrangler Jeep. There all possible comparison ends. (Though I Do Love My Wrangler Jeep.)

Brakes are similarly powerful, direct, effective. Somehow my foot feels that the pads are smaller than on modern disc brakes (Jaguar, in tandem with Dunlop, pioneered disc brakes in the Le Mans D types & fitted them as standard on every model except the 2.4 Mk 1 from 1957.) This may be just because they feel so sensual, so connected. Press hard, you slow down; press harder, you slow down more quickly - as with any car?

Yes, but somehow in the E type you seem to feel it more, as if you were sliding downhill too fast on a go cart & had to splay out your feet; firm friction gripping the road surface. The brakes on this car are in seemingly perfect condition, fluid is new (as are shocks & tie rods), it stops sound & straight - yet compared to today's ABS anchors, it all feels oddly mechanical. But delightful. Safe. It works. Any pebble in the road & you feel it. But you stop, straight & true. Love it.

Pedals, as so often in 60s sports cars, are pendant (ie hinged down from the top) narrow, & close together. I wear old Converse on my size 8s (UK 7) - anything wider would cause worry.

Gearbox - 4 forward speeds, reverse towards the L/H side driver & back - is similarly tight & direct; the box is right there beside you in the tunnel slightly ahead of us both in the cockpit - no indirect linkage to wear & to create 'play', that's one of the absolute pleasures of a rear-wheel drive sportscar. And no overdrive. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise; Jaguar never sold an E type with overdrive. Look it up. Yes, a US spec Series 2 needs it. But not really. 3000 rpm is 65-70 mph. (Speedo wobbles, remember). That's plenty fast enough for a car of this age in modern traffic, surely? E type Jags have the headlamp dipper in the dash corner in front of the driver; it looks a lot like an overdrive switch. It isn't. Oh, & the headlights? If you're going to use an E type at night & don't expect to win a concours, upgrade. Please. For all our sakes.
 

This particular car was sold brand new in California & spent most of her life with devoted lesbian partners, sharing a Californian garage with a magnificent & immeasurably historic SS1. (Immediate ancestor of the Jaguar.) As Tara aged she received a substantial makeover; engine was removed, examined, whatever deemed needed done was done, the whole car was gone through, rejuvenated as required, & everything was documented & photographed in a history file now about 4 inches thick.

Perhaps sadly, perhaps not, every inch of factory paint was removed, along with the engine, & the whole car was 'bare metaled' in the authentic Old English White finish. Evidently getting the bonnet to fit perfectly was as much of a challenge to the long-term owners as to Tara's original makers; there are chips & attempts at making metal fit flush where it really doesn't want to go, but this really just adds buckets to the appeal. E type bonnets shouldn't fit perfectly. It is un-natural for them so to do.

This car is lovely.

Lovely.

The clock works too, but that's because, as a Christmas present to Manon, Tara's present devoted owner since the Christmas of 2004, I had the original, & quite frankly hopeless inner clock workings, replaced by Teutonic efficiency - a modern VDO quartz movement, made for a Porsche 911, keeps time now, handsomely, dominating the centre of the black-finish dash. (Earlier 3.8 liter E types were a futuristic, now 'retro', machine turned aluminum; that ended along with the 3.8 engine & Moss 'box in '64.) A modern CD player is the only clue that, once inside this car, we are in 2006, not the early 1970s. Carpets are original, & the Phillips mono FM radio that came with the car is now carefully stored away- it still works too.

What else do we need? Well, luggage space would be a help. Fortunately, Josette & myself are not over-nighting anywhere with the car; if we were, well, frugality would be the only approach, like it or no. The trunk is possibly the most beautiful rump ever devised in metal, but what will actually go into it? Not a lot. The tools & jack as mentioned, a couple of small, squashy bags, pajamas & a toothbrush each? But as I said, we are not going that far; it's a day trip through the mountains on the twisting curves of Hwy 74/243, the "Palms-To-Pines Highway", where to this very day manufacturers from all over the entire world bring their mocked up prototypes for testing - & here we are, in this, in a genuine Jaguar E type Roadster. Again, Wow.

The large iron block (aluminum head) engine so close to the cabin & the warmed though gearbox right there beside us, keep everything toasty in the chill, bright mountain air. The heater fan works well too. It's just as well that the car is so comfortable to drive & to ride in with the top down, because the original-spec vinyl top (I'd have paid for mohair, no, not original, but Jaguar surely used plastic rather than cloth simply keep costs lower?) will break your back & possibly take your finger when you try to put it up. Soft tops .. The Italians made it so easy. The Germans kind of got it, eventually. But the British? "By the time you got the top up, the rain had gone, so why bother?" Was I think the design philosophy.

Handling? Nice. So much power at any point of the tach from that silken six; so beautifully recorded on the Smiths tachometer right ahead of the driver, that itself looks like it could have been styled for the first filming of '1984'. Responsive? DEFINES responsive. And the sound. Not the 'tearing silk' of a Ferrari V-12, nor the frenetic gnashing of an early 911, just an urgent, restrained, rising growl, & a detectable yet oddly reassuringly solid whine from the 'box. (Early '64 on cars are all synchro, almost all the earlier 3.8 liter cars had strong-but-awkward Moss shift.) Push it & it barks, delightfully, but really, you never need to. The 4.2 six pulls from low, low down the range & the low American spec gearing means that, well, why would you not just feel the pull in 3rd & 4th? Saves the gas, surely? She pulls from below 1500 rpm so easily, the first 2 gears seem 'fussy' after initial take off.

Oh, the gas mileage. Locally, pottering & posing on the winding, randomly surfaced mountain streets & highways - well, it's pretty terrible. Worse than a (relatively) small British six should reasonably return. I can't quote figures but I know that the 16.5 gallon tank (US - 14 gallons UK, 64 litres) seems to empty of absurdly expensive premium gas like a poetry scholar would drain a Chateau Lafitte. Yet, despite the 'sprint' gearing, on the freeway she seems to do just fine. Must be a question of keeping the throttle steady, the rpm constant. Up & down the mountain roads, anything newer or bigger than a Very Old MG (watch for our next featured car?!) just seems to evaporate a tank in a twinkle.

But the gas stops are worth it for the attention this car invariably attracts. If you like that sort of public admiration. If you have any kind of classic yourself, you know that you'll always allow extra time at the pump for admiring chit-chat from anyone near by. "What year is that?" is the most common opening remark.

In it's original Series One form, with covered headlamps & slender, more 'pure' tail, the E type Jaguar, as sellers of these cars so often point out today, is the only car to have become a permanent exhibit in the New York Museum of Modern Art. And even in very slightly 'beefier' Series 2 guise, the reason is quite evident, especially when one sees this amazing creation in the metal. Sculpturally pure beyond anything ever driven - in the most complete contrast to the "bling bling" be-jewelry of the Fins-N-Chrome US behemoths that were only just moving to extinction at it's launch in 1961 - the E type Jaguar is the purest expression of artistic integrity matched with performance & usability that could surely ever be. We haven't even touched on actually how it is designed & hangs together - stressed monocoque tub, independent rear suspension in it's own detachable cradle, space frame front end bolted to the bulkhead - let's write, perhaps, more of this at some future date. But the view from the cabin, down the bulging, aircraft like 'bonnet' - actually one third of the car's sheet metal & hinged to lift in one piece - that vista is unmatched by anything, anywhere, in motoring evolution, surely. And the sound. The scent of leather, and of Spring.

Oh to be in an E type, now that April's here. And we were. Wow.