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Driving Jaguar's Continuation Lightweight E-Type

Something has happened to sports cars over the past 15-20 years. While reaching ever-higher levels of quantitative dominance the driving experience continues to become more sterile. Stability control, torque vectoring, variable electronic steering racks, lightning-quick dual-clutch automatic transmissions – all these make it easier to harness more power and drive faster than ever before. And yet too often it feels like something is missing. There is a growing divide between the capabilities of the modern performance car and the driver's sense of connection to the experience. In an era like the one we're in now, the Jaguar Lightweight E-Type hits you like a slap in the face. The story of the Lightweight E-Type goes back to 1963, when Jaguar set aside eighteen chassis numbers for a run of "Special GT E-Type" cars. These were factory-built racers with aluminum bodies, powered by the aluminum-block, 3.8-liter inline-six found in Jaguar's C- and D-Type LeMans racecars of the 1950s. Of the eighteen cars slated for production, only twelve were built and delivered to customers in 1964. For the next fifty years, those last six chassis numbers lay dormant, until their rediscovery a couple of years ago in a book in Jaguar's archives. In an era like the one we're in now, the Jaguar Lightweight E-Type hits you like a slap in the face. Jaguar Heritage, a section of Jaguar Land Rover's new Special Vehicle Operations (SVO) division, took on the task of researching the original Lightweight E-Types and developing the methods to create new ones. Every aspect of the continuation Lightweight E-Type, from the development of the tools and molds used to build the cars, to the hand-craftsmanship, reflects doing things the hard way. They may not build them like they used to, but with these six special E-Types, Jaguar comes awfuly close, if not better. Working alongside the design team, Jaguar Heritage made a CAD scan of one side of an original Lightweight E-Type body. That scan was flipped to create a full car's worth of measurements. That ensured greater symmetry and better fit than on the original Lightweight E-Types (which could see five to ten millimeter variance, left-to-right). The scan was also used to perfect the frame, while Jaguar looked through notes in its crash repair books to reverse-engineer the Lightweight E-Type's suspension. The team repurposed a lot of existing tooling for the continuation cars, and developed the rest from analysis of the CAD scan.

Watch thieves dressed like ninjas hit dealership, steal $583,000 worth of Land Rovers

WAUKESHA, Wis. — A group of teenagers believed to be from the Chicago area broke into a luxury car dealership in Wisconsin and drove off with nine vehicles worth more than a half-million dollars, police said. Sunday's heist at a Jaguar-Land Rover dealership in Waukesha was captured on surveillance camera footage showing nine masked suspects filing into the dealership before each drives off in a car in the city about 19 miles (30.5 kilometers) west of Milwaukee. The video also shows one car being backed up and smashed through an overhead service door. Waukesha Police Capt. Dan Baumann said the suspects broke into the dealership about 6 a.m. Sunday, found where its car keys were stored and then activated those key fobs to find the cars they stole. “Nine subjects went out and throughout there looking for keys. One person finds where the keys were hidden and then starts to disseminate those to his friends,” Baumann told WISN-TV. The nine vehicles are valued at more than $583,000, he said. One suspect, a 17-year-old Chicago boy, was arrested Sunday in the southern Wisconsin community of Pleasant Prairie after the stolen vehicle he was driving crashed along Interstate 94 during a police pursuit. He was being held at the Waukesha County Jail on a $50,000 bond and faces burglary, theft and criminal damage to property charges, Baumann said. Police said Sunday that the suspects are believed to be “an organized crime group of teenagers from the Chicago area.” Baumann said Friday that all or most of the teen suspects are known to members of a police task force in southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois and police in that two-state region were still searching Friday for the eight other suspects. Six of the nine stolen vehicles have been recovered — four in Chicago, one in the Chicago suburb of Deerfield, and one in Wisconsin after the highway crash that led to the 17-year-old's arrest, he said.

Top Gear season 25 opens with a V8 roadtrip through America

Great news for fans of BBC Top Gear: the first episode of season 25 is here. Viewers of BBC America will catch the season opener on March 3, and for the American audience this episode is definitely suitable watching. The episode has been dedicated to V8 sportscars almost in its entirety, as it's been wrapped around a Western roadtrip with a motorsport bias. The three hosts get to choose three V8 sports cars, with the basic idea of finding the best all-rounder. Matt LeBlanc goes for a Hennessey-tuned GT350R, Rory Reid chooses a Jaguar F-Type SVR, and Chris Harris shakes up the pack by selecting a McLaren 570GT. It's a nicely varied trio, with V8 power still showing what it's good for. There are various challenges along the way, just like there should be on a Top Gear roadtrip episode – even if the road surface itself isn't always ideal. But things smoothen out, all the way to a NASCAR oval and an airport runway; the flooded Bonneville salt flats aren't suitable for shenanigans, so substitutes have to be found. The trio also hit dirt roads, and have to evade a buggy-driving Ken Block during a "moonshine run to the border." Fans of Sabine Schmitz will be pleased to find her piloting a chain car racer, which consists of two American junk cars with a Honda CRX chained in the middle. It must make sense to someone. The Star In A Reasonably Priced Car segment has been retained for this season. This time it's the British actor Rob Brydon driving the Toyota GT86, on a very wet lap around the show's Dunsfold Aerodrome track that must be a cult classic by now. All in all, the season 25 opener is exactly what it says on the tin. There's nothing out of the ordinary, but it still has excellent cinematography, V8 roar and some nice landscapes. Classic Top Gear. Cowboy duels, Sabine Schmitz chain car racing, @RobBrydon, a @kblock43 car chase and #TheStig The latest episode of #TopGear is available on @BBCiPlayer now. Outside the UK? See local listings here: https://t.co/HPPhbUErDu pic.twitter.com/87F53C8oYb — Top Gear (@BBC_TopGear) February 26, 2018 Related Video: