Five Faults With The AWD Jaguar F-Type, And Why You Shouldn’t Care

Why haven’t more followed the path set forth by Jaguar with its raucous F-Type? It’s a question I often ask myself: Make a sports car beautiful, and make it produce a noise that even aftermarket massaging can’t replicate. Who cares about handling? People will still love it.

It’s a simple concept proved by Jaguar, launching the F-Type to near-legendary status before it had even hit dealerships. And then came the coupe as an alternate to the convertible: Same philosophy, but even prettier.

However.

I’ve just spent a week with the monster that is the 2016 F-Type R Coupe. It boasts 550 horsepower from its 5.0-liter supercharged V-8 and hits 60 mph in a spleen-splitting 3.9 seconds. And while that’s all lovely, there is a problem.

See, the F-Type was always rear-wheel-drive. Now if you want a V8 F-Type —which you do — you’re car will arrive as standard with all-wheel-drive. This is not a good thing. And there are other faults as well:

The brake pedal sits stupidly close to the throttle pedal: I don’t always brake with my left foot, but when I do I expect my feet not to be conjoined like Siamese twins. The pedals are so close together, in fact, that your shoes will rub and then catch each other, meaning you have to consciously place each foot on the opposite side of the pedals. And then there’s the AWD issue.

The sense of speed is now muted: The beauty with the old V-8 was you’d mash the gas at low speed and the rear tires would light up in a symphony of destructive turmoil, like an intoxicated opera singer gargling five-inch nails while swinging for the overzealous conductor and his Don Rickles-like combover. It was magnificent, and yet with the arrival of AWD, that drama has gone. There’s no sense of occasion to the way the V-8 explodes off the line. It just goes, effortlessly, quickly, without fuss. It feels slower than before, when in fact the opposite is true. And then you get to a corner.

Turn the wheel and…ARGH DRIFTING: The F-Type was never engineered to take on the Porsche 911 at its own game — and it never has — but boy does it now struggle when the road gets bendy. It’s as if the engineers anticipated that AWD would create an abundance of understeer and compensated by utilizing rear tires made out of Pennzoil. You turn into a corner at a reasonable speed and instantly the back swings around. This rotation derives from brake-based torque vectoring, meaning if you carry the brake into a turn — as one often does when driving swiftly — the brake will be applied to the inside front wheel to help the car rotate. Only it’s far too aggressive. To the point where I genuinely felt uncomfortable pushing the thing hard; it’s not a happy drift, either, because you don’t initiate it yourself and it’s difficult to predict when and where it will arrive. And to make matters worse, you then get lost.