If it ain't broke....

Few efforts to improve on the E-type met with any success, but John Coombs' collaboration with Pietro Frua got closer than most

-  MARTIN BUCKLEY

If tampering with anything by Jaguar was a toxic brief for coachbuilders in the 1950s and '60s, then to meddle with the E-type seemed like a crime of arrogance akin to scrawling a moustache on the Mona Lisa. Why take the world's most beautiful car' and make it something less than beautiful? Predictably, the E-type did not prove to be a fertile playground for lily-gilders in period, although a handful tried.

Not lacking in ego, stylist Raymond Loewy thought he could do better, but the brutish 1966 XKE he had made for his own use (which is still around and still very original) seems less heretical than his attempts to improve on the BMW 507 a few years previously. About the origami Guyson E12 roadster of the early 1970s the less said the better, other than to express surprise that the firm actually built two of them.

In some ways, Bertone's radical, Lamborghini Espada-like Pirana concept car from 1967 manages to get away with it, because its E-type underpinings are almost incidental to the concept of producing a Daily Telegraph colour supplement sponsored 'ideal' car.

Not so the Frua Jag of 1966. Still indisputably an E-type, albeit in a fussier, less harmonious form, it aroused very mixed feelings when shown at the Geneva Salon that year. Reworked details that appeared acceptable in isolation - mainly the heavy front bumpers and miniaturised MkX grille - looked like a false beard and dark glasses on a familiar face. Much less obvious was the fact that the altered bonnet was heavy enough to affect the handling at first, due to the patchwork of fabricated and brazed sections used to reshape it by Frua's coachbuilder, Italsuisse of Geneva.

The car was a useful 6in shorter than the original, although some of that advantage was lost to the boxy rear bumper, which framed the chunky tail-lights and protruded awkwardly from that previously shapely rump.