Original UK-spec Jaguar E-type is up for sale from £1million
It arrived like a bolt from the blue in 1961 and immediately turned the sportscar market on its head. Flat out, it would do 150mph while just standing still its lines would cause jaws to drop; even Enzo Ferrari is said to have called it the most beautiful car ever made. No wonder one of them has been on permanent exhibition in the New York Museum of Modern Art since 1996. The car? What else but the Jaguar E-type.
Then as now the E-type is one of the most instantly recognisable shapes on the road, and praise be we get to recognise it often because there are plenty of them and they are, relatively speaking, affordable classic cars to buy and run today.
Well, most of them are. The car you see here might look like just another lovely E-type but it’s odds on to be the first million-pound E-type. And the clue to its exceptional value is in nothing more exotic than the bonnet catches.
In the pantheon of E-type variations between 1961 and 1975 –coupe and roadster, manual and auto, 3.8 and 4.2 sixes and then 5.2 V12, short and long wheelbase, two seats or 2+2 – the pure gold for collectors are the words: “External bonnet catches”.
They are the little chrome catches on the outside low down on either side of the E-type’s huge clamshell bonnet. To undo them and open the bonnet you needed a special tool, which probably wasn’t the most convenient thing for owners – and why Jaguar soon moved the latches to inside the cabin.
But not before 500 cars had been made, including the pair you see here. Being early 1961 cars, they are Series I 3.8s, one a fixed-head coupe, the other a roadster and both with the flat floor (it was later dished to get more legroom) that along with the bonnet catches and welded louvres on the bonnet signify them as early production models.
“Early” is a bit of an understatement where these two are concerned. Of the first 500 E-types with the telltale outside latches, only a handful were the coupe and only four of those were right-hand drive (the first were earmarked for export only). This car, the first of those four, was supplied by Jaguar in August 1961 to be the E-type demonstrator for Henlys in London.
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Here then is the very first UK-spec E-type; can the roadster beat that? Well, it can certainly match it, for this car’s claim to fame is that it was the first production E-type sold in the UK. The first owner? That was “Lofty” England, Jaguar’s legendary racing team manager who oversaw Jaguar’s five Le Mans victories with the E-type’s C- and D-type forebears. That’s quite some name to have in the logbook.
What price for this pair of E-type rarities? Gooding & Co, which is auctioning them at its London sale at Hampton Court Palace on 1st September, reckons the fixed-head coupe will sell for between £1-1.4m, and the convertible for between £900,000-1.2m. The million-pound E-type has arrived, making this pair more valuable than any this side of the racing Lightweights.
Not bad for a car that, at first glance, looks like any other early E-type which could feasibly be in your garage for one twentieth the price. And it’s all down to something as simple as the bonnet catches!
Images courtesy of Gooding & Co.