Offside Undo.(Brief Article)

If you've any enthusiast blood coursing through those braided steel hoses you call veins, raise a pint in salute: Happy Birthday, E-Type Jaguar, you sure do look good for 40. (Since it's a vintage Jag-you-are, perhaps it would be more appropriate to hoist a few quarts of 10-W30?) Can you believe four short decades ago Jaguar's Bob Berry made that legendary overnight screaming run from the British Midlands to Geneva, Switzerland, for the sexy cat's dramatic unveiling at the auto salon? Through a fog-shrouded night and day he flogged E-Type coupe 9600HP, often keeping the engine singing at 130, 140, 150 miles per hour. The story goes he made it to the stand 15 minutes ahead of its scheduled unveiling. (For those lucky enough to have been in New York in the early '60s, you might well remember the E-Type's unveiling at the Big Apple show, then held in the Coliseum. Today the ceremony would be termed a politically incorrect affair as Playboy's Miss June 1958 pulled wraps off a snow-white roadster. Even with that distraction, more attention was paid to the car than to its presenter.) Only if you were to spend hours on your favorite doctor's couch might you begin to understand how profound an effect that car's shape had on your life. Remember the first time you saw an E-Type's taut, sensual lines? It set hearts aflutter. Before the E-Type-XK-Cs, D-Types, XK120, 140 and 150s-Jags were robust, almost zaftig. Not the E. The E-Type defined sport car lust; it was Farrah ...