DRIVE STORY
With production of the F-Type set to end later this year, we reflect on its ten-year life by driving a special edition 75 across Spain
S mean anything,” the American actor Trey Parker once said. “It’s the time we spent together that matters, not how we left it.”
Personally, I don’t agree. When Jaguar announced in late 2022 that production of the F-Type is set to end soon, after spending so much time with the model over the last ten years, it was important I said goodbye to the car in a suitable and appropriate manner. Such as driving an example of the final special edition, the 75, from one side of Spain to other.
My journey starts at Sitges, a pretty little coastal town around 40km (25 miles) south of Barcelona. Although now a popular holiday destination, it was once the centre of motor racing in Spain’s Catalonia region and between 1908 and 1923 several road races started from here. A nine-mile oval circuit, Autódromo de Sitges-Terramar, was later built a few miles outside the town but now lies largely abandoned.
The plan is to head west on mainly B roads before climbing over the Pyrenees and finishing at San Sebastián on Spain’s Bay of Biscay coast. It might be an 800km journey that will see sun, snow and miles and miles of blue sky but I have the perfect car for such an epic journey like this, an F-Type 75 roadster with the 450PS 5.0-litre V8.
Not only does this new special edition celebrate three quarters of a century of Jaguar sports cars but the company says it will be the final update of the now decadeold model before production finally comes to an end later this year.
I can’t believe it’s ten years that I flew to Spain for the car’s original press launch. As Jaguar’s first proper two-seater sportscar in my lifetime, following months of being dripfed information about the car, I can clearly remember the excitement when I finally climbed into one. “As I pull away slowly for the first time, I get a genuine sense of this is it, this is what you’ve been waiting for.” I wrote in the June 2013 issue of JW. “Ipray it doesn’t disappoint. It doesn’t.” And a decade later, that’s still the case. The F-Type might be long in the tooth but following a subtle but successful facelift in early 2020 that saw new, slimmer headlights plus redesigned rear clusters, the car still looks good, as illustrated by the many admiring glances it receives as I cruise out of Sitges. Long, low, and wellproportioned, it remains everything a sports car should be. Plus the Giola Green of the 450PS V8 version I’m driving that’s exclusive to the 75 model is a very elegant hue while the black 20in five-spoke alloys give the car a muscular appear
