New York:
Since it was unveiled at the Geneva auto show in March 1961, the Jaguar E-Type has regularly topped lists compiled by designers and enthusiasts of the most beautiful cars ever made.
The Museum of Modern Art in New York ratified the E-Type's significance in 1996, adding a blue roadster to its permanent design collection. It was only the second road car so honored, following a 1946 Cisitalia 202 GT.
In the 50 years since its introduction, a mythology has grown up around this Jaguar: for starters, the alluring sports car almost missed its own press debut, according to the company's history.
Last-minute delays in preparing the E-Type coupe for the auto show made it necessary to drive the car from Jaguar's Coventry headquarters, in the British Midlands, some 700 miles to Geneva. The car averaged nearly 70 miles per hour on that desperate dash, which included thick fog in Dunkirk, France, and arrived with 20 minutes to spare.
The E-Type was introduced to the press by Jaguar's founder, William Lyons, at the Restaurant Hotel du Parc des Eaux-Vives, a vast French pile of a place set in a park by Lake Geneva. Journalists were taken on a hill-climb course to substantiate claims made for the car's engine in news releases.
That engine, an in-line 6-cylinder on which Jaguar's post-war fortunes were built, had its origins in World War II. According to another of the many legends surrounding the car's creation, it was born of discussions that took place while Lyons (later Sir William) and three key engineers, William Heynes, Walter Hassan and Claude Baily, performed fire warden duties on the lookout for German bombers.
They had long hours to discuss the principles and details of the best engine they could imagine. From these brainstorming sessions emerged the twin-cam XK engine, whose output, durability and smoothness became legendary.
The engine was a world-beater on racetracks in the early 1950s, and because of continuous refinement and development it was still an impressive power plant in 1961. Displacing 3.8 litres and producing 265 horsepower, it gave the E-Type a top speed of 150 m.p.h. and accelerated to 60 m.p.h. in less than seven seconds, according to reviews of the period. (Some credit, of course, goes to the car's aerodynamic form.)
The E-Type's price -- $5,595 for the roadster and $5,895 for the coupe in the United States, equivalent to about $42,000 today -- was about half that of an Aston Martin or a Ferrari.
Stylistically, the car appeared to come from the future. With its dramatic oval face and sleek body, as feline and predatory as the Jaguar name promised, it arrived into a world of tailfins like a jet fighter among prop planes.
"It is impossible to overstate the impact the E-Type had when it was unveiled," said Ian Callum, the design director of Jaguar Cars, who as a young man fell under the spell of the E-Type and the XJ6 sedan.
The E-Type was the successor, as its name suggested, to Jaguar's C-Type and D-Type race cars, both of which had accumulated brilliant competition records, including a string of wins at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in the 1950s.
A moncoque structure -- derived from aircraft technology, it did not have a separate ladder-type frame -- made the E-Type relatively light. It had disc brakes, an innovation Jaguar had installed on race cars a decade earlier, and a clever suspension that made it agile.
The engineering development was directed by Norman Dewis, who worked with Frank England, a tall man known by the wonderful nickname Lofty England. But the person who perhaps brought the most to the car and its legend was Malcolm Sayer, an aerodynamicist who had worked for the Bristol Aeroplane Company in World War II.
Sayer had created the C-Type and D-Type bodies. His attitude toward his art and profession was mystic and secretive, like an alchemist's.
Around the Jaguar design studios, said Christopher Mount, who was a curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art when it acquired its E-Type, the guiding proverb was, "If it looks right, it will be right."
Sayer's approach was more scientific; he would withdraw to a private room at Jaguar to work, consulting his complex tables of numbers and formulas and outlining mysterious elliptical shapes. He claimed to have learned his principles from a German professor he met during a post-war job in Baghdad.
"The story was that Sayer could draw the optimal aerodynamic shape of a car to within a thousandth of an inch," Mr Mount said. To test the forms produced by his formulas he did wind tunnel studies, and he attached four-inch pieces of yarn to a test model and photographed it on a test track.
In the brochure distributed when the E-Type was added to the museum's collection, Mr Mount wrote that "the car's beauty and overall harmony of line arises from the universality of these mathematical proportions, which are by definition not subjective but absolute."
But the E-Type's shape radiated a power that went far beyond any cold mathematical formulas.
To some observers, the shape seemed more biological than mechanical. Herbert Muschamp, the former architecture critic for The New York Times, described it in 1996 as "blatantly phallic." Robert Cumberford, a critic and historian of automobile design, tagged it "Phalliform Perfection," which might be a good name for an alternative band.
The car's influence extended well beyond automobile enthusiasts. The men behind Jaguar came from far more modest backgrounds than the aristocratic enthusiasts who created Rolls-Royce or Bentley. Their E-Type hinted at the revolutions -- sexual and cultural -- about to break out in 1960s Britain.
The country in 1961 still lived in the extended aftermath of wartime austerity. After the Suez crisis of 1956, the government re-imposed gasoline rationing. But the first stirrings of the '60s counterculture were visible, auguring a new attitude of cultural and class rebellion.
A new band called the Beatles performed for the first time at the Cavern in Liverpool, the satirical magazine Private Eye began publication and "The Avengers," the witty television series, began broadcasting. Hollywood readied "Dr No," for release. The E-Type seemed too sophisticated for James Bond, with his Aston Martins; it was more John le Carré than Ian Fleming.
The pure form of the E-Type did not last long. Regulations in the United States, where the car was sold as the XKE, required the headlight covers to be eliminated, which diminished the sleek look of the body. Market pressure for a 2 + 2 model led Jaguar to extend the body, providing cautionary proof of the designers' axiom that proportion is everything. The E-Type was produced until 1974, succeeded by the XJ-S.