My history with the English car goes back to the 1960s, when I raced miniaturized Lotuses on my basement slot car track. Then a friend of my dad's took me for a ride in his Triumph TR3, and the hook was set.
At 22, I nearly bought an Austin Healey roadster, but my father intervened, warning me that owning an English car was like being married to a beautiful woman with mental problems and a bad heart.
He was right. Healeys were rust-prone antiques with convertible tops that leaked like cheap pup tents. Jaguars were beautiful but inclined to fuel leaks and wiring snafus. Lotuses were fragile racehorses that demanded non-stop tweaking.
But things have changed – the English car has been reinvented. In the course of a week last month in England, I drove three cars, and together, they told the story of an automotive nation.
Jaguar F-Type
This is the heir to one of the automotive world's greatest franchises – the legendary Jaguar E-Type. The new F-Type is an industrial re-imagination of its ancestor: it has the same kind of beauty, but this time, the wiring comes from Germany, and the engineering details have been nailed down.
As I burbled through London, the F-Type's temperature gauge never budged from the middle of its range. And out on a winding back road that streamed through the English countryside south of Birmingham, the F-Type was sublime, carving through corners like a perfectly weighted sword.
The exhaust note was beautiful, the interior wrapped around me like a glove, and the F-Type encouraged me to drive ever more quickly.
The road was lined with tall hedges – I was riding a motorized bullet down a long green gun barrel.
Bottom line: the F-Type is the E-Type minus oil leaks and with better handling and brakes.
Morgan Plus 4
This may be the most English car ever built. The body panels are formed by hand and the structure includes carved ash frames. Out on the road, I looked through a flat plate windshield and over a set of graciously curved fenders. The doors were low-cut flaps and the road was just inches from my elbow, streaming past like a fast-flowing river.
Where the new Jaguar had the solid, carved-from-billet feel that typifies the modern performance car, the Morgan had an organic, hand-made quality: Its structure flexed beneath me, like the hull and timbers of a square-rigged ship tacking into the wind at the Battle of Trafalgar.
The Morgan's cockpit induced a powerful sense of déjà vu – the stubby shifter, toggle switches and glass-faced Smiths gauges brought back that long-ago ride in the TR3. And like that car, this Morgan had a magical ability to multiply speed through sheer sensory overload – driving the Plus 4 was like riding on the wing of a Tiger Moth biplane.
Rolls-Royce Ghost 2
After the raw, open-air rush of the Morgan, the Ghost took me to the other end of sensory experience scale: I rode in tomb-like silence and featherbed smoothness.
The Ghost costs as much as a house, and felt just as substantial: The Ghost's abiding quality was calmness and solidity, as if Balmoral Castle had been equipped with wheels and headlights.
Rolls-Royce represents a particular automotive paradigm. In the Jaguar and the Morgan, the engines had been visceral presences that I could hear and feel. In the Ghost, the motor supplied power without intruding – toeing the Rolls-Royce's throttle was like commanding the furnace of a country estate or the engine of a grand ocean liner.
I rode in the back while a friend drove it along the lanes near Goodwood. Driving the Ghost had been a nice, but being chauffeured was even better – there was monumental legroom, flip-down drink trays and the most beautiful wool carpet.
So which car would I choose?
I'd buy them all. Together, they are England. Hail Britannia.
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