Jaguar F-Type R Review: Goodnight, Loud Prince

Jaguar was quite late to the V8 party, introducing its first eight-cylinder road car with the XJ8 in 1997. Yet, despite its tardiness, the brand’s performance cars have become synonymous with evil-sounding, thumping great lumps of power and noise.

At least, they had. Jaguar as we know it is dead. Right now, it’s going through a transformation that will see it become an electric-only brand from 2025 and forever more.

It’s not a gradual transition, either. This year it killed the XE, XF and F-Type and in a few months time will have precisely zero cars in production. For the first time in nearly three decades, once the F-Pace SVR bows out, it soon won’t build a car with a V8. And it’ll never build one again.

You’ve read car reviews before, you know how they go. We’ll compare the merits of it against its competitors, we’ll complain about trivial button placement in the interior, lament the quality of UK roads while in a car with obscenely large wheels and talk about how much value for money you’re getting.

Yet, none of that really matters to this, the Jaguar F-Type R. I could do all those things, but it’s all completely irrelevant in truth. You can’t buy one new anymore, and if you want to buy one used, quite frankly that’s going to be a heart-over-head decision.

Today things are a little bit different, then. This is not quite so much a critical review of a car, but rather a celebration of what that car offered to us all.

I really mean to all of us. You don’t have to be behind the wheel to appreciate the looks of the F-type. For a car that at its core has been around since 2013, it’s aged remarkably well, regardless of what you think of its slightly controversial facelift (if you value my thoughts, I like it a lot). This grey-on-black spec, balances being subtle yet hauntingly present at the same time. It looks evil, suitably.

It has the performance to back it up, too. The 5.0-litre supercharged V8 is the centrepiece of this whole occasion, thumping 567bhp and 516lb ft of torque to all four wheels through an eight-speed torque converter auto.

It really does thump it too. There’s no subtlety in the power delivery. All of that torque comes in low and you can quite easily light up all four wheels, jostling for traction and bouldering its way up to a 6,500rpm redline. It’s very much a pin-your-foot and hold-on sort of experience.

Oh and what a glorious, glorious soundtrack. It’s not so much a screamer as a violent warble and whine from the supercharger and V8 in harmony, with the exhaust a glorious backing track. It’s like there’s a fire-breathing dragon wielding an AR-15 hanging off the back of it.

Suitably, the way it drives is more muscle car than a sharp-shooting sports machine. You don’t so much attack corners as float through them, with the steering and suspension both leaning towards the soft side.

The trade-off of that though is that it remains an exceptional grand tourer. You can happily cover huge distances with the V8 idling away, serenely chewing up miles and waiting for the odd stretch to summon those four tailpipe-shaped demons at the rear.

Taking it around town isn’t a chore either. It’s easy to manoeuvre around, doesn’t feel absolutely gargantuan and does offer the cameras and usual amenities to help get around some visibility issues.

It’s by no means a perfect car. The interior sure feels like something from that weird period in the late-’10s when screens were becoming commonplace but still with around 1,000,000 different buttons for the numerous functions crammed in.

Oh, and there’s a really stupid pillar on the passenger side which means whoever you’ve brought along for the ride will whinge about not being able to see what they’re setting the climate control to.

There’s also the matter of fuel efficiency, not that you’ll care greatly if you’re after a V8 sports car, averaging about 20mpg across a good couple of hundred motorway miles. It’s more about having to stop often because of a 63-litre fuel tank.

This one wasn’t cheap, either. As specced, it would have cost you £109,360 – although you can pick up one that’s a couple of years old with the same engine for around half the price.

But I promised this wouldn’t be a usual review, and right now none of those shortcomings matter. After all, it’s not like you can buy a new Jaguar F-Type anymore, let alone a V8 one, and soon no V8-powered car with that leaper on the front.

This is the end of an era. The end of the true brutish, quintessentially British V8 sports car. And what a glorious way to go out.