Dateline: May 1961, Toronto. At Terry’s Queen Street East Cigar Store, the latest issue of Canada Track & Traffic has hit the magazine rack, 35 cents a copy. Its glossy cover is ablaze with press-release photos of a sensational long-nosed red roadster and a windswept fast-back coupe, both riding on glinting chrome-spoked wire wheels. The images are compelling, and they ignite the imagination of a thirteen-year-old high school kid.

It was me. It was my first car-book purchase and its contents jolted my adolescent brain like crack cocaine. The cover story heralded the unveiling of Jaguar’s world-beating new sports car at the 1961 Geneva Motor Show: the 150 mph XK-E. It also heralded the start of my lifelong auto-addiction.

The new Jag was termed “E Type” in proper Brit parlance, but I thought the Americanized “XK-E” sounded better. I made up for it by dumping the common North American pronunciation, “jag-wahr.” The sports car crowd favoured “jag-ewe-ar,” the way Stirling Moss said it. Moss was English, and drove Jags at LeMans, so he should know.

The pictured red roadster had a wrap-around windscreen — like Moss’s LeMans racer — with, unheard of, a triple-wiper setup. It had a spectacular louvered hood (Brit: “bonnet”) with Perspex-faired headlights, and the coupe’s fast-back roofline swept dramatically back to a slippery turned-up tail with jutting chromed twin exhausts. Both versions looked purposeful, graceful, potent, and intuitively fast beyond anything else on the road.

The C.T. &T. piece, and similar reports in every other car mag in the months that followed, outlined a series of specs that supported that sensational initial impression: disc brakes (inboard at the rear for lower unsprung weight), fully independent suspension, torsion bars forward with four coil-over shocks aft, and an aircraft style stressed-skin structure with a triangulated square-tube front sub-frame. The cockpit featured two bucket seats, a short leather-booted shifter, and a racy drilled alloy wood-rimmed steering wheel. And the instrument panel was a cluster of gauges and toggles that could have been lifted from the cockpit of a World War II Spitfire.

There were no automatics. This car was for real drivers, the suave types who sported tweed caps, silk ascots, and string-back driving gloves, and who blipped their throttles while downshifting for traffic lights.

The claimed 150 mph top speed — making it the world’s fastest production car — had to be true. We kids knew all about top speeds. Peer through the driver’s side window of any parked car, cup your hand against the glass to shield reflection, and speed claims could be verified by the numbers on the speedometer. My dad’s 1960 Buick read to 120. In the new Jag it read to 160. Hard facts don’t lie.

The first E-Type in Toronto was an appropriately British Racing Green roadster, on display in the big plate-glass window at O’Donnell-Mackie’s starchy Bay Street English car dealership (where, legend had it, a scruffy, bearded Rompin’ Ronnie Hawkins had tossed down a wad of cash to buy his Rolls Royce). To a teenaged kid barely able to come up with subway fare, it was clear that stepping over the threshold would result in an immediate and unceremonious escorted exit. It was close to an hour that my brother and I stood on the sidewalk that July evening in the summer of ’61…like kids in front of a department store Christmas window.

The E-Type was rare, and unobtainably special. Spot one on your way to school and you described the sighting to your buddies, sketched its elusive lines in your Algebra book, and daydreamed about its sure-fire aphrodisiac effect on the Cheerleader squad.

My parents didn’t get it. “What good is 150 miles-an-hour? We have speed limits! Why would anyone blow the price of a big new Cadillac DeVille on a foreign car with only two seats?”

And it was small. Not tiny like a Bug-eye Sprite, but compact and contained, so that in a world of giant tail-finned Oldsmobiles and Mercury Turnpike Cruisers, it slid through traffic like a thoroughbred among plough horses…assuming that it didn’t overheat, short-circuit its Lucas electrics, or set its brakes on fire.

Sadly, as the decade progressed, deteriorating quality control, union unrest, and myopic management pushed the British auto industry into rapid decline, and the XK-E accumulated a reputation for fragility, complexity, and a cantankerous lack of reliability.

Still, I love these cars.

I’ve never owned one. In 1961, the $6,000 price tag represented an average family’s annual income. My weekly allowance was two bucks. Plus, at thirteen, I didn’t have a driver’s license.

Later, in the years before collector values went stratospheric, opportunities arose to acquire used E-Types but I shied away. The prospect of ownership seemed exciting when everything was right, but day to day co-existence might be a different question…like getting mixed up with a glamorous, exotic, evil-minded woman.

But the appeal persists. Maybe someday…

Richard Pickering is the President of BHG Media Fleet Services, a former curator/producer of the Canadian International Auto Show’s signature annual Classics Collection, and a lifelong car/airplane/motorcycle/boat guy.

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Image courtesy of Canadian Track & Traffic.