Launched at the Geneva Motor Show in March 1961, the Jaguar E-Type Series 1 set a new benchmark for road-going sports cars: independent rear suspension, four-wheel disc brakes, a 3.8-litre twin-cam straight-six derived from the Le Mans–winning D-Type, and a body styled by Malcolm Sayer that combined aerodynamic discipline with a sculptural elegance unmatched by anything else on the road. It was offered initially as a fixed-head coupé and an open two-seater roadster, with the 2+2 coupé following in 1966.
The Series 1 evolved through the decade: the original 3.8-litre cars (1961–1964), the 4.2-litre cars with a fully synchronised gearbox and improved seats (1964–1968), and the so-called 'Series 1.5' transitional cars (1967–1968) which adopted open headlights and revised switchgear to meet US safety legislation ahead of the Series 2. Roughly 38,000 Series 1 E-Types were built across all variants, the majority exported to the United States, and the model remains the high-water mark of British post-war sports car design.
The Series 1 is the purest expression of the E-Type and one of the most universally recognised car designs of the twentieth century. Period road tests recorded near-150 mph performance at a price that undercut comparable Ferraris and Aston Martins by a wide margin, and the car has been a fixture of major design retrospectives — including a permanent example in the Museum of Modern Art's design collection in New York. Early covered-headlight cars, particularly the 3.8-litre 'flat-floor' roadsters and the matching-numbers 4.2-litre coupés, anchor the model's collector market and have appreciated steadily over the past two decades.
