The Open Two Seater

What it is

The roadster is the E-Type most people picture, and the only body style Jaguar built from the first car in 1961 to the last in 1974. It shares its centre structure with the coupe: the same deep sills, the same propshaft tunnel, the same box section at the scuttle and the same rear structure carrying the suspension. What it does not have is everything above the waistline. No roof panel, no A post to B post to roof loop, no welded rear quarters and no ring of structure around a hatch aperture.

Period description of the construction, from the launch coverage in April 1961, is a body monocoque almost entirely of 20 gauge sheet steel welded up as a load carrying structure, with front and rear subframes of Reynolds tubing bolted on.

The hood, which changed more than people expect

Series 1 cars have a header with three bows, cloth wrapping on the top frame and two leather straps on the header. Series 2 cars have two bows on a grey painted frame, thicker clasps, and a lead filled damping sack fitted between the rear bows to stop the hood drumming at speed.

On material there is a point worth knowing before ordering a replacement. Vinyl is not automatically correct for an early car. The Jaguar Clubs of North America judging guide records canvas as possible through the early 1967 model year, and states plainly that no numbers are available for when the change to vinyl occurred. So a Series 1 car in vinyl may be right or may not be, and the archive cannot tell you which.

The factory hardtop

A detachable factory hardtop was available from launch, not from 1962 as one widely used timeline states. Motor Sport's April 1961 launch report prices the car three ways in the same table: coupe at £2,196 19s 2d, two seater at £2,097 15s 10d, and hardtop at £76 10s 0d, all including purchase tax.

The trade confirms fitment across Series 1, Series 1.5 and Series 2, on cars built between March 1961 and October 1970. The Series 3 hardtop is a separate design with its own part numbers. Factory part numbers for the Series 1 and Series 2 hardtop have not been established, and the place to find them is the J.30 and J.37 parts catalogues.

What to look at on a roadster specifically

• Floor pans. A specialist buying guide calls them especially vulnerable on the roadster, because an open car takes far more water into the cabin than a closed one.
• The footwells and heel wells, which collect moisture. Note that the factory panels were die forged with a distinctive pattern of stiffening webs. A plain flat repair plate let into the floor is a repair, not an original panel, and not a flat floor car either.
• The recess behind the seats. It carries seat rail mounts, drain holes, tapped seat belt anchorages and radius arm bracket attachments, so corrosion there is structural rather than cosmetic.
• Door fit. Chipping along the edges of the doors, progressing to doors that will not shut properly, is the classic signature of a shell that has gone soft.
• The front bulkhead and the engine frame mountings, which are the first check on any E-Type of any body style.

Is the roadster structurally weaker

The honest answer is that the evidence supports a qualified yes and stops short of a measurement.

What is supported: the coupe adds a welded roof, rear quarters and hatch aperture surround to the same centre monocoque, which is additional closed section material above the waistline that the roadster does not have. A named specialist metalworking firm describes roadster shell flex as an observed phenomenon, with the symptoms being door edge chipping progressing to doors that will not close, and sells a remedy for it, letting rectangular tubing into the structure, which also improves side impact protection.

What is not supported by anything the archive could find: any published torsional stiffness figure for either body style, from Jaguar, from a period road test or from a modern measurement. Nobody appears to have measured it, or at least nobody has published it.

There is also a counter consideration that nobody seems to weigh explicitly. An open car has no roof to rust and no hatch aperture to corrode, and it hides less from you. The stiffness argument and the corrosion argument point in different directions.