Paris show: Jaguar F-Type to appear at last

JAGUAR will unveil its production-ready F-Type convertible at the Paris motor show on September 27, giving the world its first undisguised look at the long-awaited aluminium two-seater before it goes on-sale in Europe around mid-2013.

The UK-based company has also announced the first engine details for the car – a spiritual successor to the famed E-Type of the 1960s that has been 12 years in the making – revealing the rear-drive soft-top will be powered by a trio of supercharged six- and eight-cylinder petrol engines.

Entry versions will be available with a newly developed 3.0-litre supercharged V6 engine in two different states of tune, producing either 250kW or 280kW of power.

Jaguar has also announced a flagship version, to be powered by the existing supercharged 5.0-litre V8 engine that produces 380kW in the XF, XK and XJ.

According to respected British publication Autocar, Jaguar is expecting a 0-100km/h sprint time of less than five seconds for the flagship variant, with a top speed of around 300km/h.

All engines will receive a fuel-saving idle-stop system as standard.

Left: Camouflaged Jaguar F-Type.

As we reported in April, the F-Type is slated to appear in Jaguar Australia showrooms within months of the global launch next year as a rival for the likes of the Porsche Boxster, BMW Z4 and Mercedes-Benz SLK.

A hardtop version is expected to emerge as early as 2014, as previewed by the C-X16 hybrid coupe concept shown at the Frankfurt motor show in September last year.

The production reveal will be the culmination of a dozen years of intermittent development, with Jaguar first floating the idea of returning to the two-seater sportscar fold way back in 2000 at the Detroit motor show with the original F-Type concept car.

Jaguar Cars global brand director Adrian Hallmark said the Paris unveiling would be a “truly significant day in Jaguar's history”, marking the company’s return to the sportscar market that it “originally helped to create”.

“As its sporting forebears did in their era, the F-Type will break new ground by delivering stunning sportscar performance while vividly demonstrating Jaguar’s cutting-edge engineering technologies and world-class design excellence,” he said.

“The next step in Jaguar’s sporting bloodline is about to become reality.” The Paris reveal will come just three months after Jaguar wowed crowds at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in June by cutting loose a well-camouflaged late-stage F-Type prototype on the event’s famous hillclimb.

The company says that since this event it has completed final verification in some of the harshest environments in the world.

More than 500,000 separate F-Type design analyses were said to have been carried out over the development of the car, comprising 10 million CPU hours of processing and creating more than 300TB of data.

Jaguar says that, had that same amount of initial design analysis been completed on physical cars, the number of prototype F-Types built would have filled the majority of the UK’s motorway network “bumper-to-bumper”.