Geneva, 1961, and the life of the model

The E-Type replaced the XK150 and drew heavily on what Jaguar had learned racing the C-Type and D-Type at Le Mans in the 1950s. The construction was unusual for a road car of the period: a steel monocoque centre section carrying the cabin and rear end, with a bolted-on tubular steel front subframe holding the engine, the front suspension and the forward bodywork. There was no separate ladder chassis. It had independent suspension front and rear and disc brakes on all four wheels, inboard at the back.

The launch

The car was shown to the press and the public at the Geneva Motor Show in March 1961. The date usually given for the reveal to the media is 15 March 1961, which is the date Hagerty and other retrospectives use, and it is consistent across independent accounts. It is worth saying that this date comes to us through journalism rather than through a surviving Jaguar press notice, so treat it as well corroborated rather than as an archival fact.

Two cars carry the launch story. The fixed-head coupe registered 9600 HP was the car lent to journalists in advance, among them John Bolster of Autosport. The open two-seater registered 77 RW is the car of the overnight drive: demand at Geneva was greater than Jaguar had planned for, a second car was called for at short notice, and it was driven through the night from Coventry to arrive on the morning of the show. Hagerty names Norman Dewis as the driver of 77 RW on that run.

Malcolm Sayer

The body was the work of Malcolm Sayer, who had trained at Loughborough and worked as an aerodynamicist at the Bristol Aeroplane Company before joining Jaguar in early 1951, after an interview in 1950. He was not a stylist in the ordinary sense. His method, described consistently by the BBC, Hemmings and his own family's archive, was to define body surfaces mathematically, using calculated curves derived from aircraft practice, then to have the panels made to those figures. He had already applied that method to the C-Type and the D-Type. The E-Type is the best-known result of it.

This matters for a practical reason as well as a historical one. The shape is not a drawing that was smoothed by eye, and panel fit on these cars follows a defined surface. That has consequences for anyone rebuilding a bonnet, which is discussed on the restoration page.

The reception, and the Ferrari quote

The reaction in 1961 was extraordinary by any measure, and the car's standing has not really faded. The Museum of Modern Art in New York added a Series 1 roadster to its permanent design collection in 1996, one of a very small number of cars to be taken in on those terms, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London holds a Series 1 open two-seater as well.

Enzo Ferrari is widely quoted as having called the E-Type the most beautiful car ever made. The attribution is repeated here because you will meet it everywhere, and then qualified, because the popular form is not what the source says. The source is a 1977 biography by Gino Rancati, who wrote that Ferrari told him privately that he considered the E-Type cabriolet the most beautiful car in the world. The wording in circulation is stronger than that, and the Geneva setting usually given to it comes from a separate account by Norman Dewis of a different remark. The full record is on the Ferrari quotation.

The shape of the model's life

The E-Type was built from 1961 to 1974. Broadly, it ran in three phases. The Series 1 cars, from 1961, began with the 3.8-litre engine and the Moss gearbox, and moved to the 4.2-litre engine with an all-synchromesh gearbox during 1964. A 2+2 body, on a longer wheelbase, joined the open two-seater and the fixed-head coupe in 1966. Towards the end of Series 1 production came the interim 1968 model year cars, known to collectors as Series 1.5, on which the headlight covers were dropped and United States market cars lost their triple carburettors.

Series 2 followed from August 1968, with a larger front air intake, repositioned lights, wraparound bumpers and a series of changes driven by American safety and emissions rules. Series 3, from 1971, brought the 5.3-litre V12, a longer wheelbase for both remaining body styles, standard power steering and a distinctly different car to drive. The short-wheelbase fixed-head coupe did not survive into Series 3. The last open two-seater was built in June 1974.

The detail of what changed and when is set out on the series identification page, with the chassis number evidence taken from published secondary compilations rather than from the factory records themselves.

The archive's own car

Everything else on this site is written from published sources. This page is the exception. The archive's author owns a 1963 Series 1 3.8 fixed-head coupe, registered 9769 HA, and its page is written from the car's own records: the factory record, the data plate, the Heritage Certificate and the invoice file.

The 9769 HA page sets out what the factory recorded, what the restoration found and put right, and what has been changed since the car left the works. It is a worked example of what matching numbers and reversibility mean in practice, on a real car.

A second documented car, TUK 129F, is also recorded in the archive, on the featured cars page.