Letting the cat out of the bag…

I hate ‘ride along’ stories, where a journalist sits next to a test driver and tries to divine what he or she can from the experience about what the car may be like. Truth is you can tell very little, and any hack who says or implies otherwise is being more than a little economical with the actualité. I hate it even more when publications try to conceal the fact in their headlines: ‘Flat out in the new such and such…’ is the usual way to suggest on a cover that a car’s been driven when it hasn’t.

But sometimes exceptions must be made, and the chance to spend any time at all in the as yet unnamed new Jaguar was not to be missed.

So I have been in the new Jag, on the JLR test track at Gaydon. At the wheel was Matt Becker, the man responsible for the way all JLR products drive and whom I first met 31 years ago for another passenger ride in another still secret car intended to transform the fortunes of one of Britain’s best loved sporting marques. Then it was the Lotus Elise and it worked a treat. This time? If you’re hoping for an answer to that question in the next two and a bit thousand words, I’m afraid I may be about to disappoint you.