DESIGN
Bucket? Check. Sponge? Check. A desire to think like Jaguar’s design team? Check. This isn’t about cleaning your car, it’s about understanding why you were attracted to it in the first place
Imagine you are Jaguar Design Director Ian Callum. A year ago you unveiled the new Jaguar F-TYPE Convertible to universal acclaim, and won a shelf-load of awards, including the World Car Design of the Year, in the process. Now, you and your team have to follow the Convertible with a coupé. Surely (literally) topping the Convertible is too tall an order? Surely design inspiration doesn’t strike twice, let alone so quickly? But even before F-TYPE Coupé was unveiled at the Los Angeles Motor Show late last year, Ian was confident. He knew they had another winner waiting. He drew confidence from the C-X16 concept car – a coupé – revealed in 2011, a year before the Convertible and which first previewed the F-TYPE, although “every surface” of that car changed slightly as the production Coupé was refined. But his confidence also came from his unique approach to sports car design. Instead of starting with a coupé and
cutting off the roof to produce a perhaps compromised convertible, Ian and his team started by designing a pure, perfect, uncorrupted convertible, and on that foundation they sculpted an (arguably) even better coupé. “We design convertibles first, because technically they are more difficult,” he explains. “In terms of packaging and structure, they are much harder cars to perfect. And aesthetically, it’s more difficult to get attitude and presence in them. I firmly believe that if you’ve got a good-looking convertible, you’ll get a great-looking coupé.” Astonishingly, such was Ian’s confidence in this approach that the Convertible was more than 95 per cent complete before work even started on the Coupé. “Before we froze the exterior design of the Convertible,” he says, “I did say to the team: ‘We’re creating a coupé next, so we’ve got to make sure the Convertible is perfect.’ We produced an idea of what a coupé might look like, based
F22
DESIGN
Ian CALLUM, DESIGN DIRECTOR, on the front wing line “Notice the line that drifts off the front wing through the door, and the way it just creeps in beyond the door. It’s like a pencil line. When I draw the first sketch, it’s a very spontaneous set of two or three lines. They should have a speed to them and it’s vital to capture the sense of spontaneity in the final car that was there in the first sketch. It’s very easy to lose that. Part of the subtlety of design is being able to capture a line like that, and letting it drift. You should be able to see where the pencil left the paper.”
Tad JELEC, F-TYPE COUPé design manager on the front lamps “When you crouch down to wash the front headlamp lens, you’ll see the reference to Star Wars TIE fighters in the lamps. The forms that we’ve put in around the projector units are very much like the wings on a TIE fighter. When you’re 10 feet away from the car you probably won’t notice them, but when you go in close you’ll see the detail.”
on the Convertible. That actually was our first attempt at the Coupé version, and we ended up liking it so much that it became the concept car.” Ian’s theory plainly worked. But given how much each version of F-TYPE shared, how different could he make Coupé and Convertible? Could the Coupé be the more aggressive, hardcore driver’s car that enthusiasts expect? Again, he is relaxed. “That wasn’t in the brief specifically, but we just knew that, by its nature, it would be. The car has great stance anyway. That was a given. That wasn’t going to change. We set out to design a handsome-looking coupé that would complement the Convertible. Instinctively, we knew that it would have a much tougher presence, and would cope with its R badge and the even tougher, faster engine it was launched with.” Alister Whelan, Chief Designer, Jaguar Sports Cars, explains exactly how a roof makes the car appear edgier. “We can really emphasise the width and the power in the haunches, because putting a cabin between those two enormous rear wheel arches gives a visual reference point to demonstrate their width,” he says. “We put an incredible amount of taper on the cabin to further reinforce this perception. So the Coupé allows us to exaggerate some of the strong design features and proportions of the Convertible. It focuses and intensifies F-TYPE’s visual message beyond where the Convertible can go. When you look at those rear haunches and the way the roof tapers between them, it’s almost a cartoon of what a British sports coupé should be, it’s so exaggerated. And we’re extremely proud of that.” But producing those full, wide haunches and a roofline that tapers in sharply as it runs back is easy to do in pencil, but far harder to do in aluminium. It’s light, but it isn’t as pliable as steel and can’t be pressed as easily into such complex shapes. Engineers with less experience in aluminum might have given up and made that huge, deep rear body side in two separate panels, with a shut-line between them. But Jaguar’s engineers found a way to make it in one single, vast, beautiful pressing, and its designers are very grateful.
“It’s absolutely fundamental to the appeal of the car,” adds Tad Jelec, Jaguar F-TYPE Coupé Design Manager. “It’s not just about design quality, it’s about the entire perception of quality. Ideally, we would design cars without any shut-lines in them at all. We want these pure, polished surfaces, like a single, monolithic aluminium block, so we’re always striving to reduce gaps, minimise shut lines and remove unnecessary interfaces wherever we can. This has a huge, huge impact.” It’s extraordinary what a difference the addition of a roof makes to F-TYPE. You might start out by wondering just how different the cars could be, given how much they have in common. However, when you see the Coupé, you will need a reminder of just how much they share, and just how little had to change to produce the perfect coupé from the perfect convertible. “Originally, we took a Convertible and put the Coupé superstructure onto it,” says Alister. “But the little flap that runs above the tail lamps is about 15 millimetres higher on the Coupé than it is on the Convertible, and that was just to optimise the roof line as it runs to the trailing edge of the car. It was a touch too low, so we played with it. That’s the only area of difference below the glasshouse between the Coupé and the Convertible.” So it appears that design lightning did in fact strike twice to create two incredible, distinct sports cars sharing the same badge, each with its own individual personality and design characteristics, yet displaying a common desire to tear up the open road. Jaguar Design’s Studio Director Wayne Burgess says you can’t fully appreciate a car’s design until you’ve washed it; until you have run your fingers over the forms and surfaces that have been sculpted by hand from clay in the studio; and until you’ve examined, as you’ve polished them, the details that might have absorbed months of his time, but that more casual observers might have missed. Inspired by this idea, we asked Ian Callum and his team of designers what we should look out for on F-TYPE Coupé as we get busy with bucket and sponge…
F25
DESIGN Alister whelan, chief designer, sports cars, on the rear haunches “The fillet radius between the glasshouse [roof] and the shoulder of the fender could only be developed by hand and eye, because it’s moving in every axis as it goes from the front of the fender to the rear of the car. At Jaguar, every car spends about 15 months as a full-size clay model being sculpted and refined by the modellers and the designers before it gets to production, because it’s the only way to get that purity of surface development into the cars. Designers can do wonders with computer modelling these days, but it’s not until you see a physical, full-size entity that you can truly appreciate the interplay of surfaces.”
Ian on the tail lamp “One specific detail that I absolutely adore is the tail lamp. It’s an exquisite piece of design. You could put it on your mantelpiece and just look at it for hours. It was influenced by the E-Type lamp, which had this wonderful sense of slimness that ran around the corners of the car, taking your eye around the body. This lamp envelops the plan view [the view from above], it envelops the body. It’s very much part of the graphic and form of the car.”
Wayne burgess, studio director, on the tailpipes “I love the fact that people will discover the tiny, technical details on the car as they wash it on a Sunday morning. On the V8, if you look closely at the tailpipes, you’ll see little holes around the edge of both finishes. They’re there for acoustic reasons. The powertrain team needed these holes to tune the exhaust note a bit further, and asked us if we were OK with that. We have to be pragmatic in how we balance form and function. When I saw them, I thought they looked like mini afterburners on an F-15 fighter jet. I thought it was a lovely visual technical detail.”
Alister on the door handle “Because it’s flush with the body and largely hidden until you use it, the function of the door handle is not immediately apparent. On an exotic car like this you can create something slightly ambiguous in the way it works, in order to protect its absolute style. When you’re washing it close up, you’ll see that it’s one surface, one less thing to disrupt the car. I love that idea. It’s not something we would put on an everyday car. As as well as the way it looks, the unique action of the door handle becomes part of the whole ritual of getting into your personal piece of machinery.”
F26
testing
Test
the hero factory A Jaguar is a thing of beauty but the tests they’re subjected to aren’t pretty! They’re poked, prodded and even petrified to make sure they’re perfect...
COLD START
LOCATION
EXTREME
CLIMATIC DEVELOPMENT CHAMBER -40°C
MODEL
XF
From the arid to the arctic, Jaguars have to run with aplomb. Enter the Climatic Development Chamber. Literally! Jaguar has a number of chambers, basically large freezers, that can plunge temperatures to -40°C (and ramp them up to +55°C). Cars are filled with different grades of fuel – known as high volatility and low volatility, that replicate fuels available in different countries – before they’re ‘soaked’ in one of the chambers for 12 hours. Once the metals, engine, oils and battery are as petrified as possible cold start tests are carried out in one of the four static chambers. It’s not just a case of making sure a car starts first time, they have to fire in a strict timeframe – a fraction of a second. Then it’s on to ‘dynamic’ tests on a rolling road in a larger freezer, complete with wind tunnel that simulates headwinds and wind chill. Winds of over 90mph, equivalent to Gale Force 12 winds which are classed as hurricanes, flow over the vehicle as the heating systems are tested, and under the bonnet to simulate engine cooling. These are followed by windscreen demist and cabin heating tests, as well as defrost tests, where water is sprayed onto the windscreen and left for 30 minutes at -18°C before the heaters are switched on. They must then clear a certain radius in front of the driver in a certain time. Chilling! RESULT
PASSED
testing
Test
SQUEAK AND RATTLE
LOCATION
CREST
EXTREME
MODEL
766mph
XF
You know squeak how annoying squeak it is squeak when you’re squeak driving and squeak you can hear squeak a rattle or squeak? To make sure every Jaguar is as quiet as a mouse (that’s lost its squeak) each model spends time in CREST, or a Combined Road Environmental Simulation Test. In the aptly (if not scientifically) titled Squeak And Rattle Test, a car is positioned on four powerful pistons which jolt, jiggle and jostle the car through a number of pre-programmed sequences. Sound recordings are taken from inside and outside the vehicle, and played back to detect any irritating noises, which are subsequently designed and engineered out before the model goes into production. As Jaguars are sold across the globe, parts that don’t squeak in the cold could well make a noise at higher temperatures. The facility has a built-in climate chamber so cars can be tested from -40°C to 80°C. CREST can even put a car through the equivalent stresses of 50,000 miles of driving in less than a week at ‘speeds’ of up to 766mph. Significant factors such as load are also tested. XJ, for example, is put through its paces with just a replica driver inside before it is fully loaded with four ‘passengers’ and a boot full of luggage. Computer Aided Engineering even allows the facility to predict how a future model might behave so engineers can start work before a prototype is built. RESULT
PASSED
testing
Test
CRASH
LOCATION
EXTREME
MILLBROOK CRASH LABORATORY
MODEL
35MPH F-TYPE
What happens when you drive an £80,000 F-TYPE R Coupé into a large concrete block head on at 35mph? Or drive it, side-on, into a steel pole at 25mph? Or hurl something very large at it? Or hit it as hard as you can with a hammer? Jaguar’s engineers demolish more than 60 cars in the course of developing a new model to make sure it does exactly as intended – keep you as safe as possible. Jaguar has to satisfy a plethora of international standards for car safety, not to mention their own even more rigorous standards. A crash test may look gratuitous, but it’s in the service of science. Engineers monitor hundreds of channels of information through the car and the dummies (which are worth up to £250,000 each) so they know exactly what happens to the car, and its occupants, in those first few fractions of a millisecond after impact. Thousands of tests are carried out on everything from the seatbelt tensioners and airbag firing mechanisms to the car’s integral structure and crumple zones. Engineers even hit the cars with a hammer to make sure the airbags don’t deploy unless they’re needed. It may not look like it but, as is ever the case with Jaguar, this is precisely how the car has been designed to look and perform in this situation. RESULT
PASSED
Turn to page F42 to read more about Jaguar’s crash test programme >>>
Test
LOCATION
MONSOON DYNAMIC WATER TEST
EXTREME
MODEL
576L/MIN
XK
Everyone loves a blast in the sun but Jaguar’s Dynamic and Static Water Tests make sure that, when you’re caught in a downpour, the dark skies will dampen only your mood and not your trousers! They do that by making sure every single Jaguar that rolls off the production line heads straight onto a rolling road to be put through the Dynamic Test. During this extreme five-minute soaking each car is drenched with 790 litres of water every minute; that’s almost 4,000 litres in total. But the testing doesn’t stop there. One car from every model line is picked at random every day and subjected to the aptly-named Monsoon Test (pictured). Designed to replicate severe weather conditions, 71 nozzles (25 underneath the car and the rest aimed at the wings, doors, roof and windows) dump more than 11,500 litres of water on the car for 20 minutes. That’s a rate of more than 576 litres every minute, roughly 10 times more water than you use in your daily shower. Every single car must pass every single test, which means all Jaguars leave the production line watertight – and completely spotless! RESULT
PASSED
testing
Test
STRESS
LOCATION
JAGUAR FACILITY (WHITLEY)
EXTREME
MODEL
150,000 MILES F-TYPE
This state-of-the-art machine is known as a Six Degrees of Freedom Simulation Rig. It mimics the stresses exerted on a car under normal, everyday driving conditions by applying longitudinal, lateral and vertical, as well as brake and drive forces to a vehicle. The cutting-edge technology basically pulls and pushes the car in every direction to test safety components, as well as all the elements of the body and chassis – from sub frames to suspension arms – for wear and metal fatigue. Test routes are pre-programmed into the rig, which can then play out exact repeats of the route ad infinitum. As it rules out driver error and can run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, it delivers extremely scientific results in a relatively short space of time. A car running continuously for six weeks on the rig, for example, can be put through the same stresses and strains that it would take a normal Jaguar driver between 10 and 15 years to reach – that’s the equivalent of more than 150,000 miles of driving in a little over one month. RESULT
PASSED
DRIVE
Everything about this place is extreme: the light, weather, LANDSCAPE and roads. DAYLIGHT IS WELCOME for just six hours in every 24. IN THIS TWILIGHT WORLD, YOU’RE BLINDED BY great shafts of sunlight, BATTERED BY glorious squalls, OR ALONE IN A FROZEN WILDERNESS…
DRIVE
The poppoppop of the paparazzi is second nature to this car, but its truly natural environment is here, on roads like this
It’s not uncommon for deep drifts of snow to close the roads for months at a time. The roads, while we’re on the subject, are made to be driven, and Bealach Na Ba could well be the pick of the bunch. It opened up the Applecross Peninsula, on the west coast of Scotland, to the rest of the country in 1822, and for years was the only road in and out of Applecross village. For much of its 14 miles, tight hairpins switch back and forth, scaling rock faces that are home to some of Scotland’s oldest settlements. In places, the gradient approaches a sky-gazing 20 per cent, and the ascent is the greatest of any road in the UK, rising from sea level to an ear-popping 625 metres. From the road’s highest point, the views are never less than extreme whatever the weather or light. Today, because of a white-streaked addition to the landscape, they are more extreme than ever. Unforgettable If you’ve seen a Jaguar F-TYPE Convertible on the road, you’re unlikely to forget the experience. Jaguar might be deluged with orders for the award-winning new sports car, but it will never be commonplace, and seeing and hearing one will always be an event. If you have spotted one, or been overtaken by one, you will no doubt remember where and when it happened. A snatched glimpse just long enough to recognise those signature headlamps, set low and wide as they forged towards you. But if you happened to be standing on the banks of Loch Carron on one particular day this past winter, you might have noticed a difference in the profile of this F-TYPE: a third ‘heart line’ in addition to those distinctive, instinctive pencil-strokes over the front and rear wings. That’s because this is F-TYPE Coupé on only its second ever outing in the UK. Its great unveiling came the previous night,
when this very car was placed on a plinth overlooking the Royal Opera House in London’s Covent Garden. The poppoppop of the paparazzi is already second nature to this car, but its truly natural environment is here, on windswept roads like this. And if you had been really switched on that day, you might have noticed the car ripped past with more sound and fury than even F-TYPE V8 S, the most potent Convertible. That’s because, with 550PS, F-TYPE R Coupé has a top speed limited to 186mph and can deliver a 0-60mph sprint in just four seconds dead. This is the new pinnacle of the F-TYPE range. Log on to jaguar.com and you’ll discover that F-TYPE Coupé is “the most dynamically capable and involving Jaguar ever built.” To anyone who has been lucky enough to drive the Convertible, that seems like quite some claim. With a stiff, lightweight, bonded and riveted aluminium construction, potent supercharged engines and technologies like the almost-sentient Adaptive Dynamics, the open-top F-TYPE seems hard to improve on. It won admiring reviews in the press, and the V8 S in particular offers a ballistic level of performance that impresses even those stepping out of 12-cylinder supercars. But what does that actually mean in the real (or slightly surreal in the case of the Applecross Peninsula) world? How does the car perform on the fast-flowing ‘A’ roads that approach Bealach Na Ba, or the fiercely winding, jinking, hairpin-littered road itself? The main contrasts between Coupé and Convertible come from the natural advantage in stiffness that a car with a roof has over a roadster. The fact that F-TYPE Coupé is so good to drive is down to the order in which the siblings were engineered. Just as the Jaguar design team started out with the stylistically more difficult Convertible, knowing they could use a great-looking drop-top as the F11
basis for the stunning Coupé, so the engineers, led by Jaguar Vehicle Line Director Ian Hoban, created the sharp-handling Convertible first, knowing that the Coupé could only get better. “F-TYPE was never intended to be just one car, and F-TYPE Coupé was always planned as the second iteration,” explains Ian. “We’d already whetted the world’s appetite with the C-X16 concept car, so the bar was set very high in terms of design. Having shown people the concept coupé and raised the expectations of the automotive world, we had to deliver on the promises the design made.” And the Jaguar design team has certainly done that. “The panoramic roof provides a wonderful graphic as it flows from the front screen over the rear of the car to the tailgate,” Ian continues, showing clearly that the Coupé was a labour of love. “Meanwhile, the rear three-quarter view is incredible. You really get a sense of the muscular haunches and you can make out the very slightest nod to E-Type in the rear lamps, especially at twilight. It’s there for those in the know.” Revolutionary If engineers are doing their jobs properly, they consider all the permutations a car may have at the outset, and build all the different body styles and powertrains in from Day One. Ian’s team always knew there was going to be a coupé, but the most difficult car to deliver is the convertible. So rather than the traditional order of starting with a coupé and then working out how to make it stiff enough to deliver the dynamic attributes when you chop off the roof, the decision was made to deliver the Convertible first, so that the car’s basic stiffness was inherent. Then, it would only get better when the roof was put on. “The fact that the Coupé has an 80 per cent
DRIVE
Driving this car is not just about the numbers and the technology, but the whole experience
stiffer body structure means it lends itself to being an even more driver-focused vehicle than the Convertible,” says Ian. The differences are relatively small, and you would need to be a highly skilled driver to appreciate them, but they’re definitely noticeable, because a highly skilled driver has overseen their development. Mike Cross is Chief Engineer at Jaguar. He is the man responsible for ensuring each Jaguar is utterly breathtaking to drive. “The Convertible is a stiff car, but the Coupé is the stiffest Jaguar ever,” says Mike. “That allowed us to engineer a little more precision, a little more accuracy, and a little more ease into the car when driving it at the limit. We could adjust the spring rates very subtly, and F-TYPE R Coupé boasts a whole raft of new technologies, such as Torque Vectoring By Braking and the second-generation Electronic Active Differential. The Coupé is about 21kg lighter than the Convertible – 40kg if you fit the carbon brakes – and that’s significant. These things don’t diminish the Convertible in any way, but the Coupé has been designed and built to be an even sharper drive.” So where does Mike place this car in the stellar list of the brand’s current line-up? “I tend to think the latest Jaguar is the best, no matter which model, but I’ve really enjoyed working on this car. And although all three Coupés are great, my favourite is the R. Because the Coupé has these extra capabilities, it suits the extra power and torque of the V8, and the whole car just feels in harmony.” Although Ian Hoban believes that first and foremost it’s important to remember that the Coupé and Convertible are both F-TYPEs, he is keen to point out that each one has a very different character. “We made sure we got the fundamentals spot on with the 340PS version,
so it has close to ideal 50-50 weight distribution and a fast steering rack,” he explains. “The supercharged engine is naturally revvy and agile, but it also has a linear growth in power and torque across the whole rev range. That combination delivers a ‘connected’ feel, with precision, responsiveness and agility. Character building “When we got those fundamentals perfect, we could then choose to apply technology or more horsepower to get a different character. So F-TYPE S, which is available as a V6 and V8 in the Convertible and as a V6 in the Coupé, introduces more driving technologies. These include Adaptive Dynamics, which gives a greater level of body control, and the Electronic Active Differential (Limited Slip Differential in the V6s), which allows the driver to progressively explore the levels of grip available at the rear end. Then, of course, there’s the Active Exhaust...” Ian laughs as he describes the exhaust note on the F-TYPE S Coupé. It is extraordinary, but it’s even more exuberant on the F-TYPE R Coupé (read more on page F28). It’s details like this that show F-TYPE Coupé has been created by people who aren’t just engineers, but highly skilled drivers and lifelong car enthusiasts who have an instinctive grasp of how a Jaguar should feel, not just how it should perform against a stopwatch. That explains why, when the F-TYPE V8 S Convertible is already so intense, Ian thinks the F-TYPE R Coupé adds another dimension. “Driving this car is not just about the numbers and technology,” explains Ian, “but the whole experience. It’s not simply about how quickly you get there, but also how you get there. That’s why some of the new technologies on F-TYPE R Coupé don’t just make it faster, but ensure it’s an even more exploitable and focused car.” F12
And what technologies. The incredible 550PS all-aluminium 5.0-litre V8 engine is similar to that fitted within the acclaimed Jaguar XJR and XFR-S saloons, but has only the F-TYPE Coupé’s lightweight aluminium frame to propel, resulting in eye-widening performance figures. It sends its power to the wide rear tyres through the Jaguar QuickShift eight-speed gearbox and its secondgeneration Electronic Active Differential. This constantly analyses surface grip levels and shuttles the car’s mighty torque between the driven wheels to deliver the maximum possible forward thrust, and is able to go from fully open to fully locked in just 200 milliseconds. The effect is subtle, but dramatic. In situations where some sports cars with similar power but a less-intelligent chassis might lose composure and spin their wheels, F-TYPE R Coupé just grips and goes. The car also includes Torque Vectoring By Braking as standard. The system combats tendency to understeer and keeps the car’s nose tucked tightly into every apex you aim it at by selectively and subtly braking the inside rear wheel. The effect is eerie, but hugely effective, and renders the otherwise unchanged steering even more responsive and rewarding. “The aim was to produce an even sharper, more precise-driving car,” says Mike. “We wanted to make it easier to drive on the limit, and because there was even more power and torque, we wanted to improve traction. Everything about it had to work in harmony. The F-TYPE R Coupé has more power and torque, but the car couldn’t feel overwhelmed by the engine. It’s about agility, ease of driving and making a car that’s engaging, not intimidating. “I think you can feel the difference in the first 50 metres. The steering is that bit more direct, and more connected, and the Torque Vectoring suppresses understeer and makes the car feel that bit lighter and more agile. Although it’s the
most extreme expression of Jaguar’s DNA yet, and ballistically fast and so precise, it still feels like a Jaguar. It’s a proper sports car.” Huge power requires great restraint: not just in the mind of the driver, but also at the end of the brake pedal. So if you spot a Coupé, check if it has the yellow monobloc calipers of the CCM carbon-ceramic matrix brakes. Despite measuring 398 millimetres across at the front, they cut 21kg from the unsprung mass of the F-TYPE R Coupé, resulting in more precise handling and better ride quality – and of course, brick-wall stopping power. And if you think that the Convertible feels like it has been milled from one piece of aluminium, imagine how the astonishing 80 per cent stiffer Coupé feels. That stiffness allows for even greater precision in the tuning of the suspension, so the springs have been made 4.3 and 3.7 per cent stiffer front and rear for even better handling, and a ride that’s firmer and more connected, yet never lacks the grace that should always mark a Jaguar. So what does Mike think is its best attribute? “For me, it has to be the steering,” he replies, adding: “and here’s a tip – F-TYPE R Coupé has a choice of three steering wheels. One is a simple round wheel with a Suedecloth covering and very little padding. It seems to lift the steering again, so you feel completely in touch with the car.” So there you have it. Yes, this car is furiously fast, but its appeal is infinitely more nuanced than that. Jaguar’s engineers have taken the natural dynamic advantages that adding a roof has handed them and leveraged them into a car that delights with its subtlety as much as it impresses with its bite. How do you ‘top’ the awesome F-TYPE Convertible? Like this. So who’s up for another drive to Applecross? Watch F-TYPE Coupé in action on YouTube. Search ‘Jaguar channel’
technology
The Electronic Active Differential is the fastest-reacting Diff ever used on a production Jaguar
IN GLORIOUS DETAIL They say that beauty is only skin deep, but judging by what’s beneath the beautifully sculpted surface of F-TYPE Coupé, they couldn’t be more wrong!
Torque’s not cheap TVBB, or Torque Vectoring By Braking, is unique to F-TYPE R Coupé. Sensors continuously monitor steering input, vehicle response and all four wheel speeds, allowing the car to corner perfectly at low and high speeds. It then seamlessly and imperceptibly corrects understeer by tailoring the amount of intervention from the Electronic Active Differential (pictured) as well as the brake pressure that’s applied to one or both inside wheels. The pressure that’s applied to each brake changes 25 times every second. The result? Perfect cornering (that you can put down to your own ability!)
F34
technology The discs can operate at up to 900°C without any fade
The panoramic roof allows 18 per cent of light, but just one per cent of UV rays, into the cabin
Ceramics just got cool These lightweight carbon ceramic brake discs provide geometric stability and therefore don’t ‘judder’ when they get hot. And they certainly do get hot – they’re designed to operate perfectly at up to 900°C for fast-lap track driving. Initial designs were put through thousands of hours of computergenerated thermal modelling. This was followed by hundreds of hours of track tests on circuits including Varano in Italy and Rockingham in England, which are both under two miles long, as well as Nürburgring in Germany, which is almost 13 miles long, to make sure their cooling systems were state-of-the-art.
The sky’s the limit From the outside, F-TYPE Coupé’s panoramic roof gives the impression of a car that’s glazed from bonnet to boot. From the inside, the panel gives the cabin an air of... well... air. This glass panel is a typically understated example of how technology has been employed throughout F-TYPE Coupé to push all aspects of the car to the maximum. The glass is curved to its limit to mirror the shape, and protection, of the aluminium version.
F37
technology
The direction of the headlight follows the steering wheel; you turn left and so does the beam
Lighting the way When it comes to lighting up F-TYPE Coupé, Jaguar’s headlamp design team (that’s right, a whole team) have created something special. Each headlamp incorporates 11 small LEDs that reach full brightness in 40 milliseconds – 10 times quicker than the blink of an eye. At speeds under 25mph, ‘cornering lamps’ cleverly hidden in the headlamp cluster illuminate the curb when you indicate. The direction of the headlight beam even follows the steering wheel – when you turn left the lights turn left, for example – so next time you’re out on a late-night B-road run, you’ll spot that bend from a mile off.
F38
Enough choice to put you in a spin This 20-inch Cyclone alloy is just one of 17 optional wheels to choose from on F-TYPE. So don’t worry if gloss black isn’t your thing, alternative wheels include features such as lightweight forged alloy, carbon-fibre inserts, and even diamond-turned wheels for a particularly special finish. And the 20-inch wheels can be fitted with Jaguar’s incredible Continental ContiForceContact High Performance tyres (see next page).
The Cyclone alloy wheel is just one of 17 to choose from
technology
Grooves on the inside aid water dispersion and a solid ‘rib’ on the outside gives more grip in corners
F-TYPE S is the first Jaguar to be fitted with an LSD
Slicker than your average tyre The fastest production car Jaguar has ever produced demands a tyre of suitable calibre. So it’s no surprise that the F-TYPE can sport an optional set of Continental ContiForceContacts developed exclusively for the car. These bespoke performance-focused tyres are the result of a meticulous 12-month development collaboration between Jaguar and Continental. They help give the F-TYPE exceptional levels of grip, braking performance, steering response, feedback and precision. Oh, and they’re road legal!
A differential with a difference F-TYPE S is the first Jaguar to be fitted with a Limited Slip Differential, or LSD. In a corner, a car’s outside wheels need to rotate faster than its inside ones because they’ve got further to travel. The Limited Slip Differential essentially transfers torque across the rear axle, basically taking power away from the inside rear wheel and donating it to the outside, which has more weight on it, and therefore more grip. This helps to combat understeer when the car nears the limits of its incredible performance, particularly when you accelerate hard out of a corner.
F41
SOUND
mu•sic n.
The art or science of combining instrumental sounds to produce beauty of form, harmony and the expression of emotion
SOUND
What sort of response did you want to elicit with F-TYPE Coupé?
The engine barks to life. A deep, guttural sound, crisp and edgy with an air of risk – like holding a cranked-up chainsaw at arm’s length. Touch the throttle and the exhaust growls and resonates in your ribcage. Sink it and the pitch rises as the car accelerates, building to a grin-inducing howl as the revs threaten the redline. Snick the gearbox into second and the thunk sounds mechanical, solid, precisely engineered. Satisfying. The crescendo rises again, deeper this time, as the speedo slips past 70mph. There’s an underlying modulation to the growl; a pulsing, staccato sound that yells high performance machine. The car strains at its bindings as it tops out in eighth, the needle nestled deep in the 180s. Kill the throttle and the exhaust spits and crackles, pops and burbles. You’re overcome with an urge to blip the throttle again; hear the growl once more. The rolling road slows to a stop in the anechoic chamber and the microphones are turned off. For Sound Quality Engineer Ashley Gillibrand, whose job is to help define, develop and deliver the voice of F-TYPE Coupé, it’s mission accomplished. The car sings and snarls in equal measure. “I feel like we’re making music,” he says with a smile. “Alright, so when you create music, it normally evolves. You don’t sit down beforehand to decide exactly what it’s going to sound like. We do start off with a clear definition of what we want to achieve, but a car’s sound does develop.” Prepare for a crash course on the science of seductive sound…
Sound explanation
Your job seems interesting. Tell us about it
I work in the Noise, Vibration and Harshness (NVH) department at Jaguar as a Sound Quality Engineer. It’s the job of NVH to deliver the sound of a specific car by minimising what we don’t want to hear, such as wind and road noise from the tyres, for example, and emphasising the ones we like, such as the burbles of the exhaust. We bring a car’s personality to life by developing strategies like: What type of sound do we want? How much do we use the exhaust and intake systems to achieve that? How can we manipulate the sound coming through the engine mounts? What can we put into the exhaust system to get the sound we want?
It needed a racecar-inspired sound. There are lots of different types of racecars and they all sound different. Formula 1 doesn’t have the same sound as NASCAR, for example. The one thing they all have in common is responsiveness. They all change quickly at speed, so we wanted a sound that was crisp, reactive and edgy. It also needed to be addictive. Even when you are not pushing Coupé, the growl is always there in the background, reminding you what this car is capable of. The temptation to push the engine and listen to the sound, that desire to want to play with the car, has been in the DNA right from the start. Do you ‘make’ the sound?
F-TYPE Coupé’s sound is 100 per cent authentic, which means it is all made by the car. We don’t create any sounds, they all appear naturally, but we do tune them and manipulate how they are transmitted through the car. How do you get the sound you’re looking for?
How did you decide what F-TYPE Coupé should sound like?
Before we start developing the voice of a new car, we’re given a synopsis of its DNA; a statement that describes individual elements of the car and how they come together to give an overall character. We’re also given a brief of how the car must sound and how those sounds must complement characteristics, such as performance and handling. We’ll then come up with a list of descriptive words and use those to build a ‘sound proposal’ on a simulator for people to listen to. At the beginning, we spend quite a lot of time working out what sound is required to fulfill a specific emotional response and then how to generate it.
We spend a lot of time driving cars – our own and those of our competitors. Our development engineers will define what they mean by ‘edgy’, for example, and we’ll use that as a benchmark to generate sound simulations. We’ll start with recordings of vehicles with similar engines and digitally modify them to achieve the sound we’re after. Working in the virtual world, with computer simulation, allows us to do a lot of work before the prototypes are even available. But we do get to a stage where the simulated sound can’t get any more realistic. That’s when we need to work with actual cars, so that we can feel the driving dynamics, understand how the handling and ride feel. Then we can match the sound of the car to its overall character.
How long have you been working on the sound by this stage?
Probably about two years, with another 18 months working on prototypes to perfect it. So you manufacture the perfect sound and then engineer the car to match it?
Essentially, yes. The entire vehicle is tuned holistically. An orchestra usually has two lead instruments, and in our orchestra they are the exhaust and intake systems. They have to work in harmony inside the car. Then there are other sounds, such as the noise from the tyres on the road, that provide the backdrop, just like the other instruments in an orchestra. Once we’ve defined the target sound in the simulator, we can break that down into which sounds come from which parts of the car – from the engine or exhaust orifice, from the intake system, what comes through the engine mounts – and tune them accordingly. What part of the car can you hear most when F-TYPE Coupé is at full acceleration? Is it the exhaust or the engine?
What you hear under full acceleration from inside the cabin is mostly the exhaust system. The majority of the sound comes from the exhaust, that’s true of most sports cars, but the car also has an intake feedback, which takes the energy from the air intake system, tunes it and feeds it into the cockpit through the dashboard. That helps enhance the sound at high speeds, because it has a higher frequency and so gives a tonal sound with a hard edge. At a lower level you can hear the radiated noise coming off the surface of the engine and the vibrations coming through the engine mounts, which give an underlying depth to the car’s sound.
It all sounds very complicated…
It is incredibly technical work. Different exhaust layouts generate varying sounds. Similarly, pipes of various lengths and diameters will generate different sounds compared to ones that are uniform. So we play around with the lengths and diameters and where we put the mufflers to get different frequencies. The car doesn’t just sound great when it’s accelerating, though. We’ve manipulated the engine calibration to enhance the crackles and pops when you shift down and under braking. The sound of the upshift – the ‘chunk’ made by the engine – has been specifically engineered by the guys working in calibration, too. The car has been tuned to make that sound at certain speeds and revs. And then there’s the loud button…
The Active Exhaust sounds incredible. The rear silencer has two parts. When the Active Exhaust is on, it opens a louder path through the exhaust, particularly at higher frequencies. Exhaust gases are more free-flowing, which gives the crescendo, the staccato pops and the crackles. When the Active Exhaust is switched off – in other words, when the car is in ‘quiet mode’ – the silencer muffles the sound to a certain extent, but still makes sure you know this is a performance car. This is a very clever system, because reducing sound usually means reducing performance. If you want to make an exhaust quiet, the easy way to do it is to throttle the exhaust system, but that creates back pressure for the engine, so you don’t get the same performance. It is quite a challenge to tune quietness into a performance engine.
The entire vehicle is tuned holistically. An orchestra usually has two lead instruments, and in our orchestra they are the exhaust and the intake systems. Then there are other sounds that provide the backdrop, just like in a real orchestra
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Do all F-TYPE models sound the same?
They all have similar characteristics, but the sounds are delivered differently depending on whether the engine is a V6 or V8. Essentially, they are like different flavours of the same dish. The V8 has a much more modulated, impulsive character, which gives it far more of a growl than the V6. What do you do in the anechoic chamber?
We have to make some complex calculations, assumptions and measurements of noise sources under ideal acoustic conditions, and the chamber makes it easier for us to be able to do that. We have a large chamber that has been designed to replicate drive-by tests for exterior noise testing. What’s the best thing about F-TYPE’s sound?
It’s so addictive. You desperately want to press the Active Exhaust button, which just makes you want to drive the car even more. The exhaust note constantly reminds you what the car is capable of, and there’s always the temptation to push the throttle and listen to the exhaust howl. See the NVH team in action on the Jaguar Magazine app. Search ‘Jaguar Magazine’ in the app store or on Google Play
SOUND
How to see sound Sound maps are like acoustic fingerprints, showing how a car sounds accelerating and braking. On this image, time runs from left to right and engine frequency from bottom to top. The quieter engine notes are blue and green, the louder red and yellow. The red strip shows the car under extreme acceleration in fifth gear. The data to the left of this shows it accelerating through the gears – the peaks and troughs (bottom left) show gear changes. The data to the right of the red block is the car on overrun, as it slows down without braking.
Shhh, did you hear something? Ashley Gillibrand is one of a team of engineers who work in Jaguar’s Noise, Vibration and Harshness (NVH) department. Their main focus is to remove any unwanted noise – known as error state – from the car. This includes silencing squeaks and rattles from moving parts, and reducing wind and road noise that could create an annoying hum in the cabin.
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who in their right mind would do this to a new
F-TYPE? the jaguar crash test team, of course, And it may just save your life
Crash
“If we don’t get it right, the consequences could be very serious. It’s critical”
Clockwise from left: Technicians sweat over their final checks on the crash test F-TYPE Coupé; A mass of wire spaghetti carries essential data on how the car performs on impact; Who are you calling a dummy? The anthropomorphic test devices buckle up; Nothing is left to chance at the soon-to-be crash site; Looking back up the tunnel from the crash
At T equals Zero, the 550hp F-type Coupé punches into a 100-tonne concrete block with enough kinetic energy to light half a million 100-Watt lightbulbs; energy which begins its journey towards the passengers. Don’t blink away the tears at the destruction of something so beautiful. Blink and you’ll miss what happens next. Actually, don’t blink and you’ll still miss what happens next, because in just 40 milliseconds the passengers will start to be hurled towards the windscreen. Forty milliseconds – a tenth of the time it takes you to blink – is how long the car has to do something to save the lives of the people sitting inside it. And that’s why Jaguar are deliberately crashing an £80,000 car today, to confirm the miracles they know it can perform in four hundredths of one second. At T minus two hours, the men beneath the giant racks of halogen lights on this cold November afternoon at Millbrook Proving Ground in Bedfordshire look as if they are preparing to launch the first ever Jaguar into space. If the moon landings were faked, this was probably where they did it, in this vast hi-tech hangar, where cars are launched into walls. The crash test the car must pass today is one of the most rigorous on the planet, and there is a nervous energy among the technicians as they prepare for it. Of all the measurements being taken, the most interesting might be the pulse of Jaguar Test Operations and Sensing Manager Steve Hickman, or the pressure that Jaguar Crash Test Engineer Simon Davies’ grip is exerting on his clipboard. In two hours from now they need to prove that the new Coupé has the right stuff. “I’ve been doing this for years,” says Simon, “and I never get any less anxious.” But, of course, the Coupé has the right stuff. It has been in development for four years and, long before they even built a prototype, the engineers in Computer Aided Engineering were running crash simulations based on decades of experience. The car practically has a doctorate in safety and could probably survive re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere if they did decide F44
to send it into orbit. Twelve months ago, once they were happy they had destroyed enough components and weighted shells in preparation, Steve and his team started crashing the first of the 60 complete Coupés that would be destroyed in some 80 tests. You’re right to wince. That’s 60 Coupés – many of the early ones assembled by hand. It’s an expensive business, but Jaguar doesn’t begrudge a penny of it – it’s about saving lives. “If we don’t get it right, the consequences could be very serious. It’s critical,” says Steve. High anxiety The first phase of crash testing generates data to feed back into the computer models, so the engineers can calibrate the safety features, such as the airbags and the seatbelts. They are now well into the second phase: the sign-off, when the car has to pass the legal and in-house tests that will allow it to drive on the world’s highways. Today’s test is considered one of the toughest: the Legal 35mph Front Fixed Barrier Impact for the US federal market. However, the standards at Jaguar are far higher and the car has already been through so much abuse with aplomb: offset collisions into concrete blocks, crashes into steel poles, side-on and moving barrier impacts, and much more. “We’re not expecting any surprises today,” says Steve. “We design a car that is far safer than the legal requirements, so we’re confident it will pass.” So what’s fuelling his anxiety? It’s the fear of a loose wire, a coordinate in the wrong place, a high-speed camera not set up correctly. The smallest detail out of place and they could crash a very expensive car for nothing. This particular car came off the production line two weeks ago and began preparation at Whitley before arriving at Millbrook three days previously. It is top of the range, complete with sound system and satnav. Those building the sports car have no clue it has been earmarked for such a short life. The car has been prepped for the last 17 days: endless hours of work for a few milliseconds of data and the shortest F45
disaster movie ever made. And with less than two hours to T equals zero, four engineers have their heads in the boot looking pensive. Routing some 80 channels of data through an F-TYPE and out the back isn’t easy, add in the 120-channel umbilical cords of two Hybrid III crash test dummies (see page F47) and you have a cable-tidy nightmare. Each cable leads from a sensor through the car to a Data Acquisition Unit mounted on the rear. One measures the stretch of the seat belt, another the deceleration of the car at a certain position, a third the pressure in a particular area. Others record events, such as when the car hits the barrier, and when one part of metalwork under the bonnet touches another as the car crumples. An R-badged, supercharged 5L V8 550hp F-TYPE Coupé is an extraordinary looking object at any time, but one prepped for a crash test is a real head-turner in its cyberpunk incarnation. It looks like C3PO has been disembowelled and pinned to the rear bumper, or like one of Fritz Kahn’s extraordinary diagrams of the human body from the 1930s, illustrating statements like: “If all the blood corpuscles in the human body were laid end to end they would encircle the world 24 times.” The car has been painted matt blue to aid the high-speed cameras and is covered in targets and coordinates, so that its position in space during those vital milliseconds can be easily modelled on computers. With just under two hours to go, Simon is rolling a silver ball along the dashboard, so he can mark the position a human head could conceivably reach during a crash. It’s for an old-fashioned test to ensure that the bonnet doesn’t penetrate the window within that space. The car sits inches from the 100-tonne block it is meant to crash into. How’s anything going to survive that? How do you stop head injury from such massive deceleration or the load on the patella being so great it causes terrible traumas? These are fails. Fuel leaks, excessive loads on the thigh bone or the neck or the lower leg. All fails. Meet the rather pleasantly
PUTTING DUMmies in the driving seat Cadavers, anaesthetised animals and even human volunteers were crudely used to assess injury and impact levels in crash tests in the past, but since the 1960s rapid advances in science and technology have put dummies in the driving seat. At the Millbrook Crash Laboratory, they’re kept safe in a side annex off the main hangar, looked after by Tony Keen who is keen to point out that they don’t ‘live’ there, nor does he give the dummies names and he definitely does not talk to them. “They are simply pieces of instrumentation that happen to look like human beings. They do as they’re told and they don’t answer back,” he says smiling. Today’s dummies, or anthropomorphic test devices (ATDs), no longer look as human as earlier models and the children barely have faces at all. “They used to have hair and makeup,” says Tony. “They looked more like
named Viscous Criterion, which measures the mechanism of impact-induced soft tissue injury. If the car doors are locked after impact, it fails. At T minus 60 minutes, the Coupé is towed back down a 220-metre tunnel on a single rail track. At the far end, staring back at the distant 100-tonne block, the engineers complete final checks. The dummies’ faces are dabbed with coloured grease, so they will mark the airbags on impact. The emergency brake is primed in case the run needs to be aborted. The car is fixed to the dolly that will launch it into the barrier at exactly the right speed. The winch engine rumbles into life. The ignition starts so there is power to the airbags and the sensing system. The fuel system is pressurised, but there is no fuel in the tank. In its place is a white-spirit base of a similar density, with dye to reveal any leaks. Clipboard in hand, Simon walks nervously back and forth between the car and a laptop,
checking prompts such as: “Are the dummies’ hands taped to the steering wheel?” There are four miles on the clock. “When you talk about the speeds we test at they don’t seem that fast, but when you actually see the car physically hit a wall, it’s pretty dramatic,” says Steve, a veteran of hundreds of crash tests. The speed – 35mph – may not seem a lot for such a fast car, but when you consider that in a real crash the driver is likely to stamp on the brake pedal, it is a high-speed impact. Point of impact At T equals zero, it’s the soundwave that’s generated as the car hits the wall that takes you by surprise: a bang that has so much mass and volume, you can feel it. It leaves observers shaking and quietly wondering if they’ve really just seen a crash. During that instant of F46
incomprehension, between T equals zero and T plus 40 milliseconds, thousands of streams of data were logged. What did the car do in its dying moment to save the occupants? The bumper beam, crush cans and longitudinals started to deform as the engine moved away from the collision and into the crush space, absorbing a massive amount of energy in the front of the car, so that the occupant space would not deform. At T plus 15 milliseconds the car had realised it was in a crash and the Restraint Control Module fired the airbags, as well as the seatbelt pretensioners, so that when the driver and passenger began to move forward, four hundredths of a second after the impact, their kinematics were controlled by the car. There were certainly no fails. For a car that impresses with its ability to do 0-60mph in just four seconds, looks incredible, performs superbly well, it also breaks in exactly
the right places and in the right direction when it does 35-0mph in 0.0075 seconds. It sits under the banks of lights now, facing the large blue kiss it has planted on the barrier in the impact. The bonnet is raised and pieces of the car’s front end litter the ground. It looks in a bad state, but it’s designed to crumple in a precisely engineered way. It’s the car that doesn’t crumple that kills its passengers. There is something oddly poignant in its sacrifice. It did everything possible to protect its passengers in the milliseconds it had to respond, then, finally and calmly, it put its hazard lights on, unlocked its doors, switched on its interior light and switched off its fuel pump. See the drama of the crash test on the Jaguar Magazine app. Search ‘Jaguar Magazine’ in the app store or on Google Play
humans, but ironically didn’t behave in the same way a human body does in a crash.” The latest ATDs are designed to act in a crash exactly as a human would. Mr Average is the £89,000 Hybrid III at 1.75 metres tall and weighing 77 kilogrammes. Made for frontal crashes, inside his humanoid exterior he packs a high tensile steel skeleton with sophisticated instrumentation that can be used to work out how severe any injuries would have been to a real person. He has 60 channels of data and is packed with accelerometers and load cells, which measure things like the movement of the rib cage, head rotation and the force through various parts of the body (the femur, hip joint or knee cap, for example). Each of these measurements, which changes throughout a crash, is a channel of data that travels back along the umbilical cord (all the wires coming out of the dummy) to a data acquisition unit on the back of the car.