Building your own car used to involve long dark winter evenings in your shed with spanners, swearing and the odd drop of blood. Now it involves ticking boxes on the screen. No blood.
One of the issues is that you can choose things that look great on the screen but might not in the cold light of day. Like the Firesand Orange paintwork. Actually, that’s okay, we think it looks epic. And then we thought we’d tick just a few boxes, not very many.
As you can see in the fact sheet at the bottom, there were in fact more little boxes ticked than we’d intended. How did that happen? How did we end up spending £71,880?
We’re guessing this is pretty much the usual result for any buyer of the F-Type S Coupe. It looks good, but it can always look better. Mind you, occasionally we were saved from ourselves. Carbon ceramic brakes? Ooh, goody goody, claps hands, yes please. That’ll be £9080 with the Storm wheels but you can’t have them with the manual gearbox for some reason. Sulks. But, actually, thank you Jaguar. Because we’re not having the auto transmission.
We decided to go a bit old school. This is a sports car sort of supercar and we wanted rear-wheel drive and a manual gearbox. That meant we couldn’t have a V8, but we could have the 380bhp V6 S, which is the most powerful version you can get with a stick shift.
The classic schtick continues with the mechanically locking rear differential and a moderately lairy exhaust note. It sounds tremendous and we’re looking forward to making it sound angrier still once it’s properly run in. For now we can push it enough that, in Dynamic mode, we know we’re in for some thrills. And we just love the way the cabin mood lighting goes from blue to roaring red when you shift to Dynamic, and the exhaust starts to really snarl.
It looks like we built this car remarkably well, and we ticked all the right boxes.
