The Supercharged 575-Horsepower 2024 Jaguar F-Type R 75 Wants You To Feel Something

I have a confession to make. When the fleet company for Jaguar told me it had an F-Type R 75 convertible available in winter, I didn’t ask anyone’s permission before booking it. The exceptionally talented Alex Goy had already covered the press launch for us, so we didn’t really need further driving impressions of this enchanting machine. However, the F-Type itself isn’t a need in a traditional sense.

Ever since it burst onto the scene at the 2012 Paris Motor Show, it’s caused hearts to race across every continent on this pale blue dot. It’s inspired love at first sight, overtime hours, stolen showroom gazes, and ethereal daydreams alike. When this car first captivated us, we didn’t need it like oxygen, but instead like filling a yearning hunger in our hearts. If any car personifies the 2010s, the F-Type is it.

In the year 2024, it’s also almost gone. Jaguar, like Dylan, is going electric, and the F-Type fits with those plans like a four-letter word in a church. It’s also, by automotive standards, ancient. That being said, it’s not common for a car to last eleven model years on the market without its presence ever seeming stale. So, is the Jaguar F-Type R 75 still the pupil-widening, aurally-enchanting, drop-dead gorgeous nicotine head-rush we all fell in love with? Is it something we’ll be missing? Let’s find out.

[Full disclosure: Jaguar Canada lent us this F-Type R 75 for a week so long as we returned it with a full tank of premium fuel, kept it shiny side up, shot it, and reviewed it. As is customary, fuel was paid for by yours truly.]

Warming Up

When the F-Type’s latest facelift was unveiled, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. The clawed-back vertical headlights had been replaced with generic horizontal units, the hood drooped down in an awkward manner, and the front and back ends felt like they were styled by two different people who didn’t talk to each other. It was a polar plunge for what had been, up until that point, one of the most beautiful new cars in the world.

Several years later, I reckon I’m coming around to it. Sure, it’s not as familiar as the original, but it certainly hasn’t ruined the car. If anything, what the new nose takes away when viewed from the front, it adds back in profile. From the side, this updated car looks longer, lower, and sleeker than before, with an extra dash of grace to the silhouette befitting a Jaguar.

Regardless of how you feel about the latest front end, the rear three-quarter view is still simply beguiling. The knife-edge taillights, swollen haunches, and pigeon-roasting upturned exhaust tips still ooze character and lust nearly 12 years on from when we first saw them. While shooting these photos, I even had an actual bird walk up to this car and admire it. That’s how bite-the-back-of-your-hand pretty it is. Oh, and can we talk about the phenomenal Giola Green paint? This desaturated shade lies in the murky waters between blue and green, pushing and pulling your retinas depending on how the light hits it. It’s British Racing Green’s tight-lipped, smoldering cousin, hard to pin down through a lens but easy to be captivated by on the street.

The Pleasure Room

This may seem like an unusual time of year to test an F-Type R 75 convertible, but honestly, the cabin just makes it make sense. Sure, the heated seats merely feel like someone’s rubbed the leather warm with their hands, but the cockpit’s reasonably calm with the roof stowed and the windows up, and has one of the best heaters in the world. Not only does the engine coolant come up to temperature almost alarmingly quickly, the HVAC blower motor is powerful enough that I spent more than half the time with the top down. In Toronto. On the coldest week in February. Carpe Diem, am I right?

With the top down, you have a chance to soak in the top-notch hide enveloping the dashboard and door cards. Rich, aromatic leather dominates the cabin, and its sheer presence underscores how well-built the F-Type feels. It’s not surprising that after 11 years, its makers have sorted all the kinks out, but there genuinely isn’t a squeak or rattle anywhere in this cabin. All the doors including the ones for the glovebox and cup holders close with satisfying thuds, and all the console-mounted switchgear has an almost Audi-like air of quality that you might not expect, given the historical reputations of British automakers. The fighter-jet shifter still feels novel, and although the rising dash vents are a touch of electronic frivolity, they appeal immensely to your inner child. Oh, and did I mention that the seats are incredibly comfortable despite being thinner than a communion wafer? Sure, they’re no longer fancy ergo-inflatable units with adjustable bolsters, but they’re just about perfect for everyday use and a thorough improvement over the pre-facelift performance seats.

Small two-seat convertibles present a uniquely challenging environment for audio systems. Not only is cramming an intimate cabin full of speakers more challenging than packing a week’s worth of luggage into a single carry-on, the system will constantly be fighting elevated road and wind noise over what you get in a tin-topped coupe. The 14-speaker Meridian sound system in the F-Type R 75 is technically astute with a fairly flat sound profile for the segment, but it won’t blow your mind with clarity or presence. Best to keep the volume low and let the eight-cylinder organ under the hood score the drive. As for the infotainment, it’s alright. Sure, it may be a little last-gen and only offer wired CarPlay, but there’s a top-level virtual button for phone mirroring and the whole system’s reasonably responsive. Besides, if you’re worried about top-notch infotainment in a two-seater, you’ve bought the wrong car. So long as it does what it says on the tin, you shouldn’t care less.

Of course, being a sports car from a relatively small marque, there are a few flaws worth noting. If you’re of the average male height, it’s easier to operate the window switches with your right hand than with your left. Left-side shoulder check visibility with the top-up is, well, actually, there isn’t any. The trunk, even without a spare tire, is laughably small and optimized for what I can only assume is an imaginary object. The infotainment screen is worse than useless in direct sunlight. The backup camera froze as I was exiting the press fleet lot, although that might be due to force-quitting while the system was still booting, and it never happened again. Oh, and since the sort of person who can afford to drop six figures on a sports car is likely middle-aged, the reach to the mesh phone pocket between the seats is one hell of a strain on the old shoulders. However, none of these are deal-breakers. It’s all stuff you can excuse the minute you press that pulsing starter button because my word, does this cat ever have lungs.

Songs For The Deaf

When the F-Type first launched, everyone went ga-ga for its vast repertoire of sinfully intoxicating sounds, to the point where if you read any magazine, you’d think it was the only sports car in the world. It hollered at full chat, cleared its throat on every flat upshift, and went full Independence Day when your iron foot lifted off the skinny pedal. Oh, and you could get it with a button that turned everything up to twelve. With the facelift, Jaguar took the F-Type’s earthquake and machine gun soundtrack down a notch, keeping things relatively demure until around 3,100 RPM, so as to not fall afoul of pesky noise regulations. I’m told that pulling fuse F41 livens things up again, but as this is a press car, I didn’t dare find out. What I did find is that even with the somewhat tamed low-RPM aural experience and the dialed-back burbles, pressing the button that makes things louder and executing a safe freeway overtake around a dangerously slow-moving Mercedes-Benz GLS may make the family inside wish they opted for the brown interior.

The F-Type R 75 is still a 575-horsepower supercharged V8 lout, armed with more firepower than North Korea and blessed with low enough morals to deploy it at the drop of a hat. Even with the leashes of all-wheel-drive and government noise standards, everyone in a five-block radius will know when you’ve buried the throttle, lit up the rear tires with the traction control fully on, and leapt from a dead stop to 60 mph well on the pupil-widening side of four seconds. Sure, a base-model Porsche 911 Carrera is just as quick (Car And Driver has the two cars just two-to-three tenths apart from zero-to-60 mph and five-to-60 mph, with the Porsche leading the former and the Jaguar leading the latter), but it doesn’t have anywhere near this caliber of malevolent violence. For those three-and-a-half seconds or so, you are the almighty, creator and destroyer of worlds. Emboldened, imperious, and beaming like a newborn scientist.

A Linebacker In Ballet Flats

Eight model years ago, the F-Type underwent a conversion from hydraulic power steering to electric power steering, and surprisingly, I have zero complaints. Sure, the wheel doesn’t dance in your hands over minute road camber changes, but it’s rods-from-God accurate and beautifully weighted. It’s the same deal with the silky torque converter automatic transmission. The ZF 8HP may be 16 years old, but it’s still a gold standard that rips off paddle-commanded shifts faster than you can blink.

However, despite touches of surprising sophistication, the F-Type R 75 isn’t a hummingbird with license plates. Even with a multitude of computers and 305-section rear tires, the F-Type R 75 can’t be described as lithe, which is to be expected in something that weighs as much as a Fiat 500 Abarth with an entire Ariel Atom on its roof. You are always aware that 380 mm front discs can’t work miracles, and that any change of direction will be deliberate rather than telepathic. The word “delicate” isn’t in this car’s vocabulary, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t proper fun in the corners.

Somehow, the springs, adaptive dampers and anti-roll bars manage to keep this 3,946-pound cannonball in check, allowing for just enough body motion to communicate what the car is doing but not so much that anyone gets the impression that someone taught a hippo how to run. You know exactly how the F-Type’s weight shifts, what each tire is doing at any given time, and whether you should back off a little bit around that on-ramp. Add in the code brown escape route of all-wheel-drive pulling you off the apex, and the F-Type R 75 is your friend. It’s here to excite you, not bite you, character growth over the initial rear-wheel-drive V8 models.

While we’re on the subject of character growth, let’s talk about ride quality. When the F-Type was launched, it should’ve come with a directory of chiropractors, but tuning changes have helped it mellow out over the years. In the 2024 model, you are constantly aware that you’re driving on tarmac and not marshmallow crème, but even over potholes that are geologically classified as caves, the ride never gets harsh. How much of this is the revised suspension tuning that came with the facelift versus the Pirelli Sottozero winter tires fitted to my test car? It’s hard to say, but the overall effect is eye-opening.

Speaking of livability, if you settle back down into normal mode and treat the go-fast pedal with some modicum of respect, you’ll laugh in the general direction of the EPA’s fuel economy estimates. Even when tasked with shunting around nearly two short tons of leather and aluminum, a fierce V8 with a many-speed transmission that keeps things below 2,000 RPM at most times isn’t particularly taxed. I managed 21 MPG over a week of driving, beating the EPA’s combined rating of 18 MPG by 16.6 percent. Is that green enough for you?

The Burning Questions

As I mentioned at the beginning, Jaguar is going all-EV next year. I can’t blame it. As good to drive as the mainline models are, they weren’t clawing substantial market share from the Germans, and back when this decision was reached, almost every brand was all-in on electric cars. One can only imagine that an XJ sedan gliding along on quiet electricity will be marvelous, but make no mistake, a world in which you can’t saunter into a Jaguar showroom and purchase a supercharged V8 F-Type is worse than a world in which you can. However, since this is the end, there are two questions we need to answer.

The first is hard: Jaguar F-Type R 75 or Porsche 911 Carrera? At $119,875 including a $1,275 freight charge ($136,300 Canadian) as-equipped, the F-Type R 75 certainly isn’t cheap, and it finds itself in the crosshairs of Stuttgart’s ass-engined legend. The Porsche 911 is the European sports car archetype, ruthlessly optimized to do everything exceptionally well. It’s also about as costly, about as quick in a straight line, and about as flashy as Jaguar’s garage rock revival act. The truth is, the 911 is a better sports car. It’s lighter, sharper, and simply more willing to change direction. It’s also more practical, more spacious, and will likely hold its value better than the F-Type. However, while the 911 is a scalpel, The F-Type is a chaise longue afternoon with a bar brawl soundtrack, a bicep-flexing heavyweight brute of a sports car when you want it and an incredibly settled bubble of calm when the city’s pure mayhem. On paper, you’d have to be mad to choose it over the Porsche, but cars aren’t driven on broadsheet.

The second is even harder because it’s not grounded in certainties: Is the F-Type R 75 a fitting end to the modern Jaguar that ignited pure desire? After all, it’s not the fastest F-Type, nor the loudest, nor the most driver-focused, nor the rarest. It’s not even technically the last F-Type, as several months after the F-Type R 75 was unveiled, Jaguar announced something called the ZP that sports racing-style gumballs and painted grille surrounds. While it’s easy to sit here and hypothesize about Jaguar mating a ZF S6 six-speed manual transmission to the V8 to create the ultimate F-Type, there are two major things to consider: Racing gumballs on modern street cars make the driver look a bit silly, and the 80 percent use case is more important than the extremes.

Peaky output and semi-slick tires and spring rates firmer than concrete are all well and good on a billiard table-smooth track, but in the real world with cold, damp mornings and traffic and potholes and sleeping policemen, they can be horrible. I suspect Jaguar knows this, so it gave the F-Type R 75 a mesmerizing new shade of Giola Green, machined-spoke wheels with enough of a face to not disappear into the arches, a few tasteful insignias, and little else. In the real world, that’s all we really wanted. Through continuous refinement and a handful of little touches, this late-production special edition is the Jaguar F-Type at its very best. I’m genuinely going to miss it to tears when it goes off-sale. Cherish it, or better yet, buy one, because once the calendar swings to 2025, Jaguar sure as hell won’t make cars like this anymore.

(Photo credits: Thomas Hundal)

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