Published:
8 May 2020You needn’t look very far to see where the majority of the F-Type’s facelift budget has been spent. The car has a sharp-eyed new look that freshens its visual appeal really effectively. New bumpers, grille, headlights and tail-lights and a reprofiled bonnet all feature, along with new alloy wheel designs and a renewed colour palette.
The Jaguar F-Type’s engine range has been altered quite a bit over the car’s lifetime and now offers arguably greater breadth of choice than do any of its direct rivals, albeit with slightly less associated variety. Jaguar added 296bhp 2.0-litre four-cylinder turbo petrol power in 2017, having introduced four-wheel drive with the range-topping F-Type SVR version in 2016 and then rolled it out more widely.
With this update, however, the firm has phased out supercharged V6 versions of the car (at least as far as European markets are concerned) and introduced a new ‘detuned’ 444bhp supercharged 5.0-litre V8 variant to fill the mid-range void that they have left. Four-wheel drive is available as an option on this mid-range P450 version and is standard on the range-topping 567bhp V8-powered P575 F-Type R we elected to test. Entry-level four-cylinder P300s are rear drive only. All F-Types now come with an eight-speed automatic gearbox from ZF.
Jaguar’s suspension and running gear revisions are at their most extensive on the F-Type R, which gets wider 20in alloy wheels than its direct predecessor had, as well as new rear-axle hub knuckles and ball joints, and new adaptive dampers, coil springs and anti-roll bars. The transmission gets the same electronics used in the XE SV Project 8 super-saloon’s, allegedly delivering quicker paddle shifts, and the engine produces marginally more power and torque than did the V8 of the old R.
