One of the cool things about writing about cars for a living is that you get to experience a lot of very different vehicles, often within a few days of each other.
This can be good. But it can also create some issues.
I recently drove a Jaguar F-Type R with all-wheel-drive and a BMW M235i, more or less back to back.
But I didn't drive the F-Type on the street. I drove it at the Monticello Motor Club in upstate New York, on a track, while wearing a helmet. I drove it very fast. And not particularly well, but still.
The BMW was driven mainly on the Saw Mill Parkway, north of New York City, and in suburban New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan. No helmet, but I did break out the driving gloves.
This is by no means a fair way to compare the two cars. Business Insider's Ben Zhang checked out the F-Type (a slightly different version) last year and was blown away. We didn't name it our Car of the Year — that honor went to the Corvette Stingray— but the voting was close. The Jag I drove had a supercharged, 550-horsepower engine. Sticker price: $104,000, which is actually a bargain for a car of such stupendous power and performance.
The BMW, meanwhile, had a 320-horsepower, turbo-charged inline 6-cylinder engine. And no AWD. It costs $43,000.
About the only thing these two cars have in common is that they both have two doors.
They certainly don't have in common my love or affection. I was grateful that Jaguar allowed us to enjoy some track time with what is, in many respects, a road-going race car. But as stunning as the F-Type R is when you let it run free, the car left me with nagging impression that I just didn't like it all that much.
It took about two days of thinking about this to figure out what was bugging me.
It's that the car is pretentious. The car the F-Type is supposed to evoke is the legendary Jaguar E-Type, regarded by many as the most beautiful car of all time. The E-Type is special: the car is all sleek curves, and not one of them is out of place. It looks like it was drawn up by the Almighty and carved by Da Vinci. For my money, it's the only car ever built that deserves to be called a work of art.
F comes after E, so the F-Type was conceived to be a modern-day version of the E-Type. It certainly has presence. But that presence is loud. The E-Type whispered. The F-Type roars.
Not that the Jag can be entirely blamed for being pretentious. There's an arms race afoot in the luxury sports-car market to present oodles of power and potency in a strutting, self-confident package. Jag needs to keep up and would clearly fret if it couldn't.
For what it's worth, the M235i is also a product of history — specifically, the smaller BMWs of the early 1980s through the early 1990s. These were versatile, relatively luxurious sport coupes that were (and still are) flat-out a blast to drive, particularly the high-performance M3. The M235i isn't actually an "M" version of the current 2 Series (M is BMW's performance division). So although it isn't an M2, it is a much snazzier version of the base 2 Series coupe. (Also, BMW hasn't held back on the M badging, so confusion is understandable.)
This is not a pretentious car. But it is the best way in the world to turn a half a tank of gas into acceleration and handling over the course of a few hours. It weighs in at 3,400 lbs. — only about 200 less than the Jag. So while the F-Type is objectively much faster — 0-60 mph in 3.8 second versus the Bimmer's 4.4 — the BMW feels quicker.
Mind you, the BMW isn't burdened with the same aesthetic legacy as the F-Type. It looks sharp, but adding a few angles, swoops, and a pair of raptor-like headlights is enough to greatly amplify the utilitarian im