Hamlin, West Virginia, is nowhere. Which is exactly the place Jaguar sports-car development has been for the past 40 years. The XK? That, good sir, is a GT. That anything small and uncompromisingly sporty could or would grow in the sizable shadow of the E-type has long seemed impossible, what with Jaguar’s spasmodic management over the decades. Yet here is the 2014 F-type, a proper two-seater with a folding fabric roof whose ancestral link to that last great Jaguar roadster is its audaciousness of spirit as much as its naming convention.
Fashioned primarily from aluminum, as were some Es, the F-type’s lightweight metal is welded, riveted, and bonded for the unibody and cast for the suspension, with huge sheets of it stamped and wrapped tightly around the supercharged engine. Our F-type V-8 S is thoroughly modern; this part of West Virginia, not so much. A town of 1100, Hamlin sits along Route 3, some 35 miles west of the capitol in Charleston. The closest hotel room is in Hurricane, 20 twisting miles north through the hills.
We’re headed the opposite direction, shooting down Upper Mud River Road, which leaves Hamlin on the west side and mirrors the meander of its namesake. Real-life superhero Chuck Yeager grew up in these parts and went to high school in town. We’d like to say we came here on a pilgrimage, to divine something about speed by traversing the ancestral asphalt on which the first man to break the sound barrier hustled his daddy’s Chevy pickup as a teenager, but that would be a lie. A sign along the highway clued us in.
No, we endured the road construction and the customary speeding ticket in Ohio during our 350-mile drive down from Michigan for the most honest reason imaginable: to find a good place to drive. West Virginia may not have a whole lot going for it, but when it comes to roads, it’s got the right stuff. You can turn off the freeway damn near anywhere and you’ll find challenging roads, fast roads, tight roads, mountain roads. Plenty of John Denver’s country roads are here, too. And in West Virginia, even the straight roads are crooked.
For the first couple of miles, the patches and pockmarks on Upper Mud River Road are rough enough to tell us everything we need to know about the F-type’s ride quality: It’s good. The independent suspension with adaptive shocks is always firm and the car corners flatly, yet we never find ourselves crashing over the barklike surface.
Bumpy or not, these are some of the faster sections of our route, where each easy bend is followed by enough straight to see what the car can do. The F-type is as quick as the Mud River is brown. Zero to 60 takes 3.6 seconds. With no wheelspin from the 295/30ZR-20 Pirelli P Zeros, acceleration is as forceful as floodwater. Occasionally, a thunderstorm forces us to slow below 30 mph to raise the top. That takes 12 seconds; the quarter-mile, just 11.9.
Specifications
