For three years of my life, I lived in the second greatest city in the world. London. I told my mother I moved over there for a job opportunity but it really was a rouse. I moved over there to buy a track car and drive on the storied tracks of Europe.

In my travels from manufacturers’ own test tracks to Nurburgring, I met what I came to realize are the real British people – serious gear heads.

These were people like Nick. A guy that just had a baby but still was able to convince Mrs. Nick that what the family needed was a two-seat 2000-pound track car for the weekends.

Stuart was another story entirely. He spoke the Queen’s English but rather than driving he spent time kitting out his garage with a wheel and pulley system that enabled him to remove the hard top from his convertible without leaving the driver’s seat.

Then there was Bo. A Danish transplant that came to London for the technology and finance industries only to terrorize the sea of right hand drive econoboxes with his left hand drive car and socialist, trying to cross the communist border to the free side driving skills.

With all this gearhead, there was one thing missing. Not one person I met owned a Jaguar. Before I moved over I thought they were handing them out at the airport but upon arrival I didn’t think much of it. Once back here stateside, I set out to find an answer to this oddity.

I started with the obvious. Unreliability. Or as the Nick, Stuart and Bo like to put it, ‘British charm’. My closest brush with this brand of charm was the very day I picked up that snazzy track car. Of course, it was raining, but the surprise was a very leaky roof on my day old car. Upon pressing the manufacturer who shall remain nameless and is not Jaguar, they claimed the car was sold as ‘watertight’ and not ‘waterproof’ and that was acceptable (I still have the letter to prove it). Painful then and funny now, this type of charm just doesn’t apply to Jaguars of late.

 

From 1999 until last year, Jaguar’s caretaker was Ford and aside from sending blank checks, their mission was to dispel the myth that Jaguars leave you on the side of the road. Something we don’t think about in Toyota and Honda obsessed America however, as I found out just after my arrival, all too real after a visit to the TVR showroom. The salesman’s best pitch for his car was ‘as long as you are comfortable with this car leaving you on the side of the road at least once a year, then you are a TVR man’. Considering that TVR is no longer with us and Jaguar is, I would say mission accomplished.

Could it be the cars? Are they too bland compared to what Nick, Stuart and Bo were driving? To answer that question, I spent a week with the latest XK Coupe.

Let’s start with what is very British. There is so much elegant wood and leather in this car that you don’t so much make monthly payments as you pay club dues. The particular car I had was delivered with a whopping 17 miles on the odometer. I overdosed on so much suede, calfskin and burled walnut that I checked into Betty Ford a day after returning the car. No lack of real charm here.

After the initial high, I began to notice some very un Jaguar and for that matter, un British things. A lot of whiz bang technology. The most obvious is the gear shifter pilfered from the XF. This is about as much a gearshift as tofu is comfort food. What you have is a big round knob that pops up from a flush yet beautifully finished aluminum console upon ignition. Best as I could figure, it is Jaguar’s way of duplicating the pageantry of the changing of the guards for the subjects in the colonies. From there you just turn your way to a gear and go. For the likes of Nick, Stuart and Bo, there are paddle shifts on the steering wheel that allow real Brits to manually change gears of the new six speed automatic.

And that is where our story comes full circle. When you start manipulating paddles up or down you realize something wicked this way comes. A new 385 horsepower V8. This engine and transmission combination has transformed the base – if you can really call it that – XK. Yes, there is a 510 hp supercharged model on offer but that is a story for another day. There are really two personalities with the XK Coupe. One in which you can roll down the Kings Road on one of the two days of British summer enjoying the relaxed pace of one elegant cat.

 

The other, a Cheetah preparing dinner. For the base car, the straight-line performance is staggering. It is when you present this elegant feline a corner that things begin to go, er, sideways. At a more relaxed pace, the XK will go around corners as elegant as her lines dictate. Try to push it a bit and you begin to reproduce Discovery channel shows of big cats chasing the highly more maneuverable Gazelle.

 

OK, so I admit to being an Anglophile but there are three things that bother me on the XK. The first, the infotainment and ventilation controls. Most everything goes through a main screen. Not so bad until you realize that everything is controlled with all too small buttons within the screen. What is more maddening is that the system is so slow to respond to your input so when you do make a mistake, which is often, it takes entirely too long to correct it.

The second is more of a pet peeve of British coupes. Why no sunroof? Not even for an extra charge! For such a beautifully elegant car, why no panorama glass roof that would open up the interior with light and when open, let in a bit of fresh air? I do not subscribe to the school of thought of ‘hardtop or convertible and that is acceptable’.

 

The third and probably more pedantic are the front lights. They are one of the design focal points of this otherwise beautiful Ian Callum designed car. Why the larger wrap around light? Why not take a page out of his still stunning Aston Martin DB7 design and go with a smaller round light. Not only would it be far sexier but also it would be a great design connection to one of the most beautiful designs of all time, which also happens to be a Jaguar, the 1961 E type?

If Jaguars had this kind of heart back when I was resident of the British Isles, I feel Nick, Stuart, Bo and whole lot more Britons would be behind the wheel. Maybe I can get a cheap flight to Heathrow – perhaps they have indeed started handing them out at the airport after all?