my name is mwd

Rent a Jaguar F-Type V8 S and drive down CA 1 to Big Sur.

It’s mostly by chance I happened to find myself doing this. I was looking to hire an MX-5 for the weekend, but Laura spotted the F-Type, and for a couple of days, it was actually not insanely priced. I didn’t really know where to go, but upon stopping in Santa Cruz for coffee I asked the barista, and he said I should go to Big Sur if I’d never been.

The road down there is amazing. Once you get past Monterey you have two driving modes:

1: You stop every mile or so, along with the dozens of other people doing similar, to pause and just admire the jaw dropping scenery and take photos. The photos are either for yourself, or for other people wanting their picture obscuring the landscape if you make the mistake of looking like you can operate a camera. At which point they also ask you about the car. Everyone asked about the car.

2: You get rare moments when the road is empty (i.e., you pulled out from a photo taking break ahead of a slow moving vehicle that’s holding up all the other traffic), then you open up the car, hugging the tight bends and enjoying the benefits that come from having rented that $100K car people keep asking you about, and doing what they all want to hear you can do with it.

Do this enough for the better part of a day and you’ll become convinced the world isn’t that bad a place to be after all.

The car is also amazing, more so than I expected. Recently I had cause to drive a Porsche Cayman S around the Porsche testing track at Silverstone under tuition, so had a good idea of what a performance car can and should be like. The F-Type, whilst not as technically precise as the Cayman, was more than capable enough for real roads, and had a suitably knowing sense of pomp and theatre to match its statistics. A very usable car that can switch between being an understated town car to a brutish sports car at the flick of two switches. Whilst I’m sure that the cheaper Cayman would own in the track, on trips like this I’d take the F-Type any day. Which surprised me, as i thought the precision German engineering would be obviously better, but the F-Type is just so much fun whilst will being more car than I will ever learn to master, but would have fun whilst trying to do so.