Discovery Channel Magazine: Inside the E-Type

Discovery Channel Magazine, February 2011

For as long as cars have existed, they have had the ability to make people, and particularly men, go a bit gooey and excitable. But surely no car has ever induced quite such bracing palpitations as the E-Type Jaguar.

First launched in 1961 and refined into various sublime models along the way, everything about the E-Type conveys style, grace and class. Look at it. Just look at it. It’s like somebody turned a panther into a car. It sounds like one, too.

One man who fell in love with E-Types long ago is Henry Pearman, who has devoted much of his professional life to restoring, rebuilding and generally reviving them. He first got the E-Type bug after seeing one parked on the way to the coast when he was four or five; then he remembers it turning up in a Cadbury’s Milk Tray advert in the early 1970s. “There was an E-Type that had to jump across a broken-down bridge,” he recalls. “I thought: that’s my favourite car ever. One day I’m going to get one.”

He would do more than that; he once won a Pirelli marathon in one, across Alpine rally routes, against a field that included Formula One legend Stirling Moss. In 1982 he established Eagle in Sussex, England, first to restore E-Types, and since 1991 to undertake an extraordinarily comprehensive hand-crafted rebuild to a modern day standard of quality. This is more than a revamp; building one the Eagle way takes, on average, 4,200 man hours, and the team only produces about three per year. BBC journalist Quentin Willson has called the resulting Eagle E-Type “probably the best build handmade car in the world,” and it reduced Jeremy Clarkson to a jelly-legged lust. “I think this, by a long way, is the most beautiful car I have ever seen,” he said after trying one out. “It might actually be the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. This to me is absolute perfection. I will put my hand on my heart and say here and now I have never ever driven a car ever that I have wanted more than this one. I yearn to have it.”

So what’s so special about the E-Type? “The first thing is the shape, which is the first thing you see,” Pearman says. But beyond that is its durability as a symbol of something beautiful. “We’ve gone through two generations now that stop in awe of it. Young people see something fantastic in it. When you get it into shape, you get lots of looks and people’s faces drop – but as well as that, people cannot believe how modern and easy they are to drive.”

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