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A car writer's year in new vehicles [w/video]

Christmas is only a week away. The New Year is just around the corner. As 2014 draws to a close, I'm not the only one taking stock of the year that's we're almost shut of. Depending on who you are or what you do, the end of the year can bring to mind tax bills, school semesters or scheduling dental appointments. For me, for the last eight or nine years, at least a small part of this transitory time is occupied with recalling the cars I've driven over the preceding 12 months. Since I started writing about and reviewing cars in 2006, I've done an uneven job of tracking every vehicle I've been in, each year. Last year I made a resolution to be better about it, and the result is a spreadsheet with model names, dates, notes and some basic facts and figures. Armed with this basic data and a yen for year-end stories, I figured it would be interesting to parse the figures and quantify my year in cars in a way I'd never done before. The results are, well, they're a little bizarre, honestly. And I think they'll affect how I approach this gig in 2015. {C} My tally for the year is 68 cars, as of this writing. Before the calendar flips to 2015 it'll be as high as 73. Let me give you a tiny bit of background about how automotive journalists typically get cars to test. There are basically two pools of vehicles I drive on a regular basis: media fleet vehicles and those available on "first drive" programs. The latter group is pretty self-explanatory. Journalists are gathered in one location (sometimes local, sometimes far-flung) with a new model(s), there's usually a day of driving, then we report back to you with our impressions. Media fleet vehicles are different. These are distributed to publications and individual journalists far and wide, and the test period goes from a few days to a week or more. Whereas first drives almost always result in a piece of review content, fleet loans only sometimes do. Other times they serve to give context about brands, segments, technology and the like, to editors and writers. So, adding up the loans I've had out of the press fleet and things I've driven at events, my tally for the year is 68 cars, as of this writing. Before the calendar flips to 2015, it'll be as high as 73. At one of the buff books like Car and Driver or Motor Trend, reviewers might rotate through five cars a week, or more. I know that number sounds high, but as best I can tell, it's pretty average for the full-time professionals in this business.

1965 Jaguar Series 1 E-Type Roadster shows what Classic Works can do

You might have heard that England's Queen Elizabeth recently celebrated 70 years with a four-day Jubilee throughout London. You might also have heard about the Platinum Jubilee Pageant that stretched nearly two miles long, featuring thousands of performers and a whole lot of cars. More than a dozen of the vehicular contingent came from Jaguar alone; the brand has a long history with the royal family, Jaguar Land Rover being one of four automakers possessing a Royal Warrant to provide motorcars to the queen. And Jaguar wanted to highlight this participant among its phalanx, a 1965 Series 1 E-Type Roadster restored by Jaguar Classic Works.  It doesn't have any connection to the queen, but billed as a showcase of "the full capabilities of Jaguar Classic and ability to comprehensively update E-types," it could be taken as a small indicator of how much more the automaker could do for monarchs. A private customer went to Jaguar Classic Works with a request for an E-Type built the year he was born, the final product to be "relied upon for daily driving and be comfortable on Grand Tours while remaining authentic to the original."  First, fixers fanned out, locating an example built two days after the new owner was born. Its pathetic condition posed no problem for the restorers in Coventry, who didn't leave anything alone during the 12-month build. Going by the before picture, technicians started by swapping the original left-hand drive for right-hand drive. They bored the original 4.2-liter engine to 4.7 liters and undisclosed power, "optimised for road driving." The mill's output is sent through a sport manifold and exhaust and a custom five-speed manual transmission. The gearbox is an in-house Classic Works production originally created for the E-Type 60 Edition that delivers "a smoother, quieter and more refined driving experience." Wider wheels and tires, and more powerful brakes, are bolted to an upgraded suspension.  The cabin and sheetmetal received attention worthy of the mechanicals. The exterior is drenched in a custom blue based on the Union Jack that took months to perfect; in-the-metal pictures at Coventry Live show just how lustrous the paintwork is. The red interior recalls the red of British pillar boxes, their term for mailboxes.

Jaguar XFR-S is motor-porn on a mountain road

The 2014 Jaguar XFR-S might have only been good enough to take the runner-up spot in our Editor's Choice top five debuts at the LA Auto Show, but we'd be hard-pressed to find a car with a more exhilarating exhaust note. As proof of this, Jaguar released a video showing the XFR-S tearing up a windy, European mountain road in close to a minute of hardcore driving footage.
The big blue cat has the same great exhaust note of the XKR-S, and the driver puts all of the car's 550 horsepower to work demonstrating the handling - and drifting - abilities of the new XFR-S. If there's any disappointment to be had, it's the fact that you have to jump to the 30-second mark of the video for any of the action to start.
Scroll down to watch the video, and be sure your speakers are turned all the way up.