Vellum Venom: 1962 Jaguar E-Type Coupe (Series I)

One of the core elements of Vellum Venom is to educate while avoiding regurgitation of car design tropes you may see elsewhere. So I won’t bring up Enzo Ferrari’s hackneyed quote about the Jaguar E-Type, and instead talk about this car’s star power with artists of the time. (Google his quote if you must.) This Jag was on several album covers of the era, and I found six without even trying. But the following album will always be my favorite composition, both from a musical and a graphic design standpoint.

Blue Note Records is known for its iconic album covers, and the use of Donald Byrd’s own Jaguar E-type to take full advantage of the camera’s perspective was pure brilliance. That lusciously long hood forces the artist into the background, blurring the foreground so the artist at the A-pillar remains crisp. Very few hoods can make this happen, so let’s run this British icon over the vellum to learn more.

The E-type was a stylistic homage to the race-proven D-type before it, but it was packaged to be a replacement for the XK-150 street car. While it has flaws, none are present from the front, which is dominated by the long hood, organic face, and slender chrome bumpers. That hood is actually a clamshell, which means it gets to incorporate many elements into a single part. Well, sort of…as you shall see.

Stand up straight and the organic face reveals itself as being chrome rimmed across the cheeks, as a thin mustache, and heavily outlined around the eyes. The bling is almost heavy on such a low slung, low volume front fascia, but the mohawk of a power bulge on the long nose with frilly cooling vents on each side do a fantastic job balancing out the brightwork.

Go even higher and the face turns into three bullet shaped wedges at each corner and the center of hood. The E-type literally has three submarines coming to the surface, mostly thanks to a hood so long it forces the bumpers and grille to be an absolutely tiny part of the equation.

This is the E-Type’s “Donald Byrd” angle, an iconic angle for my Jazz-infused mind. I shoulda posed by the A-pillar, as I’d be blurry and not take away from the subject matter.

The fender “submarine” that houses the headlight has complementary curves to the rest of the body. This Series I E-Type (1961-68) also benefits from slender turn signal/marker lights precariously perched atop the small bumpers. The shape of the light mimics the submarine form just above it.

Sometimes a 3D object is hard to project on a 2D surface, but the way the turn signal submarine wedges itself against the bumper contouring is clean, effortless and absolutely brilliant.

That signal light is almost as brilliant at topping the body as the “headlight submarine” rests atop the area that would be considered a fender on a normal car. You can feel it pushing against the water as it comes to the surface.

Granted that’s a pretty looking piece of hardware, but the headlight trim ring would look so much better if it was bolted from the underside of the hood instead. But that’s hindsight, as many cars of the era used externally mounted hardware to install bits to a beautiful body.

Much like the surfacing submarines, the E-Type’s bumper has thrusting elements that convey speed. These upright bumperettes feel like the engines in a twin-prop plane, providing collision-repellant functionality on par with that of a propeller that allows a plane to soar in the sky.

There’s an organic, fish-like quality to the grille, as Mother Nature made the most logical ending to such a natural set of contours. The center bar with integral emblem adds necessary surface tension, which is lacking in gaping-maw sports cars like the AC Cobra. But the bar is so slender and invisible that the rest of the front end is easy to appreciate.

Then and now: The E-Type’s intricate, highly rendered cat’s head logo placed in front of a red sunburst graphic conveys raw aggression. This is in stark contrast to a modern Jaguar logo, which is so deconstructed that someone realized the word J-A-G-U-A-R needed to be spelled so it isn’t mistaken for an adorable high school mascot.

Necessary Aside: As of this writing, the automotive Internet is lit on fire by Jaguar’s new minimalist logo, and the fever dream of an advertising campaign that came with it. Traditional enthusiasts are not happy, as we’d expect. I counter this is a 1970s postmodern throwback, and it’s closer to the spirit of the Mid Century Modern E-Type than any Jaguar logo we’ve had in several decades.

You could park our green Jag lengthwise in front of this logo’s wall, place Twiggy and a Get Carter era Michael Caine between the two, and it makes perfect sense.

Close your eyes and try it.

Go ahead, it’ll come out well.

I promise.

Back to the E-type’s front end: Part of the organic nature presented here must be credited to this car’s forgotten design heroes. The front bumpers extend into the grille, sliding under the vertical bumperettes. This ensures the bumperettes thrust out of the bumper correctly from every angle, and don’t look like a bookend between the grille and the bumper.

You can never understate the value of making one piece of metal take the place of the hood, fender, front fascia, and the external frame of the grille. The purity of design with this singular engineering directive almost guarantees a beautiful design.

Except it is not one piece of metal: it’s three. Jaguar did a fantastic job integrating the body panels with a modest chrome character line, ensuring it looks like one piece of metal with a stylish pen stroke down its sides.

And that pen stroke is so darn elegant, connecting the headlight bezel to the chrome bits covering the roof pillars.

The central hood bulge is the perfect partner to the two fender blisters. It truly is a foreboding submarine ready to fully surface.

The cooling fins between the “submarine” add surface tension to an otherwise flat panel, but clearly serve a purpose. Too bad they are just stamped-in like an HVAC register, unlike that lovely bit of chrome at the back of the submarine.

Opening up this stunning clamshell hood bonnet shows us how cars were made before crash structures and insurance repair concerns were a thing. We see how the fenders are bolted to the hood, a behind-the-scenes look at how many elements are needed to make one beautiful thing.

Behind the bonnet is a fully exposed, painted cowl with three modest windshield wipers to clean the E-Type’s short but wide windscreen. They are thin, fine, and delightfully entertaining to see in person. The same can’t be said of the cowl-mounted antenna (likely a dealer installed affair) but sometimes function makes for an impressive form.

About that cowl: never before have I seen one that’s so clearly presented and differentiated between the fender, front door, and rocker panel. The abundance of right angles makes it look like a room in the Atari Adventure video game, but adding curves here would both detract from the body’s curvature (where the sky bends in the above photo) and likely draw more attention to the fact this cowl is not integrated with the rest of the body.

Exposed cowl notwithstanding, the Jag’s dash-to-axle is simply astounding. And always stunning. No wonder Donald Byrd looks so small on that album cover!

Be it a jazz musician or any number of famous people who owned an E-Type, this dash-to-axle ensures the passenger cabin plays second fiddle to the important bits that power the voluptuous body. This is cab-backward design presented at its logical extreme.

Knockoff wheels have a long history in motorsport, as the winged hubcap is “knocked off” with a mallet to change wheels. Jaguars look fantastic with them, even the Mark II Saloon just wouldn’t be the same car without these wire wheels.

The A-pillar and subsequent wraparound windshield are where things fall apart for this sleek and sexy touring car. The implementation is awkward and fragile, as the windshield wraps into the space where we’d normally expect an A-pillar. Wraparound windscreens were commonplace in the 1950s and early 60s, but this wrap is very aggressive for a car with such a small cabin.

The A-pillar is awkwardly upright because of the windshield. Not a big deal, except that it’s shockingly parallel to the B-pillar. Very few vehicles have this level of pillar conformity, at least when they are not upright in something like a 1930 Studebaker.

The chrome framing around the windshield is a tribute to a handcrafted era where one-piece moldings were just a dream. And it looks fantastic, provided you don’t see its parallels with the B-pillar.

Having an A- and B-pillar parallel to each other is not a design flaw, at least from this angle. But I openly wonder if a sleeker A-pillar (that began closer to the hood) also provides a bigger aperture for the front doors, improving ingress/egress. (Perhaps someone with more experience with E-Types can chime in here.)

Jaguar played a sly little trick with your eyes when it came to the upper portion of the door and the base of the B-pillar. The curvy sheetmetal near the door handle (which is an extension of the clamshell’s contouring) used to be the bottom of the daylight opening (DLO) in the Jaguar D-Type, but there’s a vertical filler panel between it and said DLO in the E-Type. Perhaps the body-to-glass ratio was too skewed to “glass” without that filler panel?

That horizontal filler panel between the DLO and the curvy bit of metal was the right move. From the B-pillar and the front of the C-pillar, it is clear this was the right amount of glass for this body side.

If the Jaguar D-Type ever came in a coupe, it would bear these attributes. Well, if the D-type could be long enough to need this elongated quarter window. Was that dip in the coachwork really necessary to give D-type vibes for would-be E-Type customers at Jaguar showrooms?

The aforementioned “curvy bit of metal” is actually quite the complicated series of curves, at least when seeing how much effort it took to make this fuel filler door.

And that quarter window changes its shape relative to where you stand in relation to the E-Type’s absolutely gorgeous C-pillar. Popping it out for ventilation adds a surprising amount of style, much like tilting a sunroof on a newer vehicle.

The quarter window is pretty enough to make the casual observer overlook the fact there’s also a frame that doubles as a rain gutter.

The awkward, stunted A-pillar is the only fly in the ointment of this particularly delightful cab-backward cabin. Everything flows as it should, and I thank my lucky stars this E-type wasn’t butchered into a convertible as so many of its brethren were a few decades ago.

The rear of the tapering body ever so slightly dips below the rear wheel, while the chrome bumper uses that extra real estate to ensure it hugs this wheel arch as beautifully as the front bumper does to its front wheel.

Much like how the quarter window changes shape relative to one’s vantage point, the rear hatch can either be sleek like a sports car or practically rotund like a passenger car. Having a hatchback with a flat face like the clamshell hood would alleviate that, but would subsequently ruin the lines from some angles.

Much like the front windshield, the rear glass is sealed up using assembly methods lost to time. These chrome insert sleeves certainly make assembling two moldings a lot easier, and it still looks better than a preformed rubber/butyl seal we see in modern cars.

The rear three-quarter view is a breathtaking mix of fast lines, swoopy chrome, and futuristic lighting pods. (Even the odd A-pillar looks perfect from this angle, making it hard to hate elsewhere.) The rear bumper and lower quarter panels elegantly rise upward, making a “kissy face” for the whole world to pucker up to.

Bullet-nosed cars are one thing, but a bullet-shaped butt? I’d sacrifice a few miles per gallon in aerodynamics and all the cargo-carrying capacity in the world to have this posterior make production again.

The “sideways exclamation point” design of the rear lights are bold relative to the sheetmetal around it, but they rest easy above the rear bumper. The hard bevel of the rectangles are accentuated by the chrome trim between the two lenses. And the thick chrome base ensures the lights aren’t lost in the bumper’s bling, while also distancing themselves from the impossibly flat demeanor of the sheetmetal that it’s screwed into.

Look closely in the reflection of the clouds just above the taillight gasket. The puffy white cloud is run through a blender, and that’s the same point where the taillight has a big red circle. While impossible to see in a 2D photo, the contouring here has a charming interplay between rounded chrome and taut green metal.

As previously mentioned about the rear hatchback, the rear fascia is so deeply contoured it looks more upright/stodgy from some angles. But that’s a good thing, as part of the joy of admiring a 3D sculpture is how it shapeshifts as you move around it. And the rounder, beefier angles against pointier elements do work well with the rear bumperettes.

Speaking of shapeshifting, the upright demeanor of the rear fascia by the bumperettes is absolutely destroyed when looking at the fastback roof and laid back rear door. If there’s a sleeker, cooler hatchback ever put into production, I have yet to see it.

Close the rear hatch and you realize just how cab-backward this design truly is. That ensures the cargo area disappears down the same cliff as the rest of the rear end. But the hatchback’s curvy nature also looks like a “submarine” like the one in the center of the hood. It’s far bigger, but the rear wheel arches are similar to their frontal counterparts, and the whole package echoes the perfection presented in the front.

And just like the front, there’s a centrally located negative space between the bumperettes. The rear bumper does not perform the same elegant transition that the front did into this space, likely acceptable considering a license plate light is mandated. A license plate isn’t nearly as charming as the front end’s thin chrome band and Jaguar logo, but putting the reverse light below the plate ensures it’s nearly impossible to find by a casual glance.

Perhaps hiding the light is a shame, as its bezel is tapered to match the aggressive “kissy face” of this lower fascia. Today we see exhaust tips integrated into the body this way, but the E-Type mounts its exhaust even lower, with resonators on full display as an act of mechanical purity.

I can see the appeal of the E-Type convertible from this angle, as the coupe has a big forehead from this angle. And perhaps it is a bit too organically round, as a hard edge in the metal around the hatchback could make it more sporting, more aggressive.

Or not, as there’s a perfect balance between all necessary elements in the posterior of the Jaguar E-Type. To this day you know this vehicle was designed for a balance between performance prowess and daily driver practicality. Even the tail lights are in perfect proportion with the rear bumpers, blending while standing out from all that green sheetmetal.

A wild thing, with just the right amount of bling, if you will.

Speaking of things that are wild, isn’t imitation the sincerest form of flattery? Tone Lōc’s iconic Hip Hop album from the 1980s (with the hit song Wild Thing) puts both the artist and the Jaguar in the same depth of field. Both are in focus, giving the Jaguar more credit than Donald Byrd did with his Blue Note album cover.

While Lōc used a Series III E-Type instead of the cleaner Series I presented by Byrd, his album proves that outstanding new cars (from the heyday of Jazz) become classics (and Hip Hop icons) as time progresses. The blurry, disrespected E-Type was a commodity vehicle for Byrd, as a wrecked one is instantly replaced at your local dealership. Not so with Lōc, which makes his album cover an honorable hat-tip to a revered classic.

Perhaps he was just as proud as I was to photograph this particular E-Type. Because this was a treat for me, and here’s the part where I thank you for reading Vellum Venom as I’ve always done for the past 12 years: I hope you have a lovely day.