Performance Car - September 1994

RHAPSODY IN E by Peter Tomalin 

With an ultra-streamlined body wrapped around a full-house 340bhp racing engine, this has got to be the ultimate E-type. Peter Tomalin drives the £160,000 Lynx lightweight

The sun is pounding so furiously at the south coast of England that the sands will surely melt and the ocean boil. Or that's how it feels from where I'm sitting — strapped into the turret-like cockpit of a Sixties-style road going racer with less ventilation than a pair of rubber Y-fronts. It's hot in a tin roof cat, I can tell you. There are other reasons why my glistening palms are slipping and sliding round the polished wood rim of the wheel. One, this car has the most powerful version of Jaguar's XK straight six engine I've ever sat behind — three hundred and forty race-bred horses intent on liquefying the narrow strips of rubber around the rear wheels. Two, the delicate, hand-beaten aluminium panels that surround me, many of them stretching well out of sight, are as valuable as they are exquisitely beautiful. And three, the man who paid £160,000 for this car is coming to collect it in a few days' time. But I can stand this sort of heat. The thing is, it's a fairly major thrill to drive even a standard E-type. Multiply that by ten and you have some idea why I'm savouring every last second of my time with the machine they call the Lynx Lightweight E-type Low Drag Coupe.

Now that's quite a mouthful, but it goes a long way towards explaining the nature of the beast - arguably the most desirable of all Jaguar's sports/racing cars. 

Lynx, you will remember, is the Sussex-based engineering concern and Jaguar specialist which made its name building superbly crafted facsimile D-type Jaguars for well-heeled enthusiasts. Today a younger generation of cat lovers has grown old enough and rich enough to indulge the fantasies of youth, so the company has begun to reproduce road/race E-types to the same exacting standards. 

Lynx offers two variations on the Lightweight theme. Its 'basic' Lightweight E is a recreation of the extensively aluminium-bodied roadsters-with-hardtops built by Jaguar in the early '60s by privateers like Briggs Cunningham. Lynx takes a standard E-type as the donor car, but weight is reduced by using aluminium for bonnet, doors, bootlid and roof, power increased to around 285bhp by tuning the 3.8 or 4.2-litre six, and suspension and brakes substantially uprated. The result is a hand-built, blisteringly quick (0-60 in under five seconds) but still practical road car. The inclusive cost is £82,250. 

And then there's the Low Drag Coupe, which, even it had no other claim to greatness, must surely rank as one of the most emotive shapes ever formed around an engine and four wheels. 

The lines flowed from the pen of Jaguar's legendary aerodynamicist Malcolm Sayer. To these eyes they put even the original, immortal E-type in the shade. In fact despite the obvious resemblance there are scarcely any shared panels, even the doors are a different shape, and where the standard E can appear pinched and a touch spindly of track, the low-drag special never looks anything but toned and squat and purposeful. But still quite disarmingly beautiful. Better looking even than the Aston DB4GT Zagato, according to photographer Robain, and as he's spent entire days squinting at both cars, he should know. 

As with all Sayer's masterpieces, including the D-type and the ill-starred but nonetheless fabulous XJ13, the beauty was almost coincidental to aerodynamic efficiency, The swept-back wrap-around screen and the exquisitely tapered tail helped give the Coventry cat 10 per cent less drag than the contemporary Ferrari GTO, with which it was designed to do battle.

Just two such cars were specially-built by Jaguar - one for British racer Dick Protheroe, the other for German Jaguar dealer Peter Lindner; who shared the wheel with his friend Peter Nocker. These streamliners had their moments, and Protheroe's car, CUT 7, had several successful outings in the mid-60s but Jaguar was no longer fully committed to racing and there was never the development needed to consistently match the Ferraris. The story took a tragic twist when Lindner's car crashed in the wet at the Montlhery circuit in 1964, killing the driver and three track marshals. 

The Lynx takes elements of both CUT 7 and the Lindner-Nocker car, which had subtly different features, to create a road car of truly unique style but one that stays as close as possible to the spirit of the originals. And everything about it is just so. Lynx even adds a matting agent to the paint (Ecurie Ecosse blue) to enhance the period look. It wouldn't do to be too shiny. 

"We don't want it to look as though it was built last week" explains chairman and managing director John Mayston-Taylor, the 39-year-old former racer turned businessman who bought Lynx in 1992. "A modem paint-job just wouldn't look right" he says. And the number plates are all sign-written. We even run a bit of emery paper around the rim of the wheel to give it a slightly distressed look.' Now that's attention to detail. 

And this car abounds with mouth-watering details. The three-eared spinners on the genuine Lightweight Dunlop-pattem alloys; the giant flip-up filler for the Le Mans 45-gallon fuel tank, the rivets running proud along the seams of the flowing rear wings. 

Lynx started out restoring and maintaining historic cars. "We have a respect and a feel for them" says Mayston-Taylor. "So we would never do certain colours. And we wouldn't stick on massive negative camber, We like to think customers come to us for the way we do things".

"I like to think a car has been what we call 'Lynxed'. Every car we build has a feeling, like a signature on it. And that comes from the people who build it. Even if I wanted to knock stuff out cheap, the people here wouldn't do it. They have their own standards." 

What lies under the bonnet of the Low Drag Coupe is something rather special. Just consider; while £57,500 would buy you a whole Jaguar XJS VI2 Convertible, it wouldn't even pay for the engine in this car. 

Only the cast-iron block is standard 3.8-litre XK. The rest of the specification makes compelling reading: dry sump, a one-off crankshaft turned from a solid billet of steel, Carillo con-rods, Cosworth forged pistons, an original and extremely rare 'wide-angle' head with substantially bigger valves; authentic 'Lightweight' camshafts Lucas mechanical fuel injection... 

This, then, is the ultimate spec for an XK engine, and Lynx quotes 340bhp at 6000rpm giving the ultimate E a power- to-weight ratio of around 285bhp per ton. They've clocked 0-60 in under 4.5 seconds, 0-100 in around 11, and though Protheroe's car was running a longer final drive when it hit 168mph at Reims no-one's going to argue with this particular E-type's 150 mph potential, 

Indeed, just about the only thing that happens slowly with a Low Drag Coupe is getting inside. The door aperture is unbelievably small. Eventually I hit on a backside-first technique which seems to involve temporarily dislocating several major joints, then reassembling once ensconced in the leather-trimmed bucket seat. Headroom's OK, but it's pretty cramped in there, and already I'm working up a sweat as I haul on. the foul- point racing harness and slide open the small side window the single means of ventilation. 

The furnishings are pure sports car, pure Jaguar, pure joy: an elegant, broad-rimmed alloy-spoked wheel, big, clear, black-on-white Smiths instruments beyond, a short, polished alloy gearstick emerging from the quilted leather-covered transmission tunnel, and everywhere the soft feel and sweet scent of Connolly's finest leather. 

Turn the key and there's the whine of the fuel injection pump in the tail.  Don't wait too long now - it's a fearful drain on the battery. Open the throttle a crack, thumb the starter button and after a second's churning the straight six erupts with a rich, rounded below from the twin exhausts, despite the heavy  silencing deemed essential for extended road use. 

The clutch is heavy and bites right at the top of its travel. It requires plenty of sensitivity, just the right number of revs and a deal of conviction to pull away cleanly in first without sending a judder through the transmission.  It comes with practice. And that's the hardest part over. 

The throttle is light by comparison and acts like a hair trigger, but you must feed it in progressively - too heavy a right foot at low revs and the engine bogs down. Treat it like a precision instrument and your reward is the most delicious flood of energy that swells up and sends the Lightweight E hurtling forward as though it's just caught the scent of some spectral GTO. 

Given its stage of development, it's a remarkably tractable engine, with instant access to prodigious torque whatever the revs. But the real thrills come thick and fast when the needle swings past 3500. At that point there's a subtle change in the 3.8's character, a fresh urgency in its delivery and a corresponding hardening of the exhaust note. The heart that's beating now is the heart of a racing car. 

The gearbox is a standard E-type all- synchro four-speeder, the shift weighty and rather long in the throw but satisfyingly positive, wonderfully precise. Slide down into third, and the E thumps past clusters of traffic with the merest squeeze of the big metal pedal. It's stirring stuff and it's as though you only have to breathe on the throttle to tap the XK's full might.

At the other end of the straight it takes a much firmer push on the servoed brakes to achieve commensurate deceleration, but the uprated discs eventually do the job. Like some people, they just need prodding into action... 

Few modern sports cars could outrun the Lynx in a straight line. Those that might are likely to be hampered by excessive girth on narrow twisting roads, whereas the relatively narrow E can be placed near the crown, the better to exploit all the available grip. In fact with 205/70 VR15 Michelin XWX covers on the front and wider 225/70s at the rear, dry-road grip is surprisingly strong. And the unassisted rack and pinion steering is not only quick and unerringly precise, but alive with messages. Initial understeer is telegraphed to your fingertips, and if you heed the warnings and allow the car to settle into the comer, your exit will be flat and fast. 

There's a gloriously taut feel about the whole chassis. Lynx personnel have spent countless hours on the track honing Jaguar's all-independent suspension. For this car; specially-engineered upper wishbone spindles at the front allow them to increase negative camber, while an additional link from the rear suspension to the monocoque keeps the back end better tied down. Thankfully, for a car that's so well suited to long fast road voyages, this tautness is not at the expense of ride comfort, which is surprisingly supple. 

And that's what I want to do now. Drive a really long way, very quickly indeed. A few snatched hours with this car is nowhere near long enough. 

Which is exactly what John Mayston-Taylor wants to hear. "The way I see it," he says, "Lynx is in the business of selling dreams."

So that's one Low Drag Coupe, sold to the journalist with the sweaty palms, the daft grin and the hopeless optimism.  Well, we can all dream, can't we?