A lot of junk mail goes right to the recycling bin.

Amongst the pile today was an attractive clear envelope with a offer from Jaguar.

Here is a link to event info.

http://www.jaguarusa.com/drive-exper...vate/overview/

I signed up for September 29 and will provide a summary after going.

To date, I have only seen a single new F Type on the road and I can't say I really liked the front end. The back is very well executed.

Anyway, it looks like I should be able to toss an F Type around plus a couple of other new Jags at the event.

Any one else receive the invite in Chicagoland or any other region?

 

I went to this last year, before F-type was around obviously. Their big draw was the XK-RS, as well as the rest of the lineup. They had a recorder set up in the XK-RS to get a personalized video of a 0-100-0 run.

 

Today was the day for me at the Jaguar alive driving experience .

A beautiful day for the event held at Arlington Park (horse racing, actually saw some horses between races being walked).

Nicely run event, lots of staff, a welcome tent with some Jag history, a few displays of current underpinnings of the cars, an XK-RS to see but not touch, some iPads to interact with, some videos running about the F Type, limited food/drink.

Once your group is called, you head to a tent where a product specialist provided an overview of the event (technology course for the AWD system, dynamic course to showcase the supercharged XJ, XK and XF cars and the autocross to play around with the F Types).

The technology course was a simulated hill and a simulated right turn, with slippy slides to show how the car behaves with and without the electronic nannies and to demo the AWD in the XJ and XF ( I drove an XF). The course also had some rough patches to demo how well the chassis takes the bumps, and does not rattle or creak.

The dynamic course was kind of a lazy autocross that allows the drivers to open up the cars and push the braking limits a bit (the cars sound great). I drove the XJ (loved it, handled a lot better than I expected based on sheer size) and the XK (car is really dated and has as useless a back seat as I have seen anywhere).

The F Type Autocross was the most fun. The set up is to drive the V6 and the V8 but my instructor was in a good mood and offered to let me do 2 runs in the V8. The car is a hoot to drive and seems to have too much power for the brakes to keep up with. The steering was the most engaging of all the Jaguar I drove. Really a fun top down experience. The downer is that the car is pretty small (strange to have that come from a former S2000 owner) and too much of the interior materials were hard plastic. I also am not wowed by the look of the F Type, particularly the front.

Here are a couple of pics to get past the no pics of it didn't happen police.

They had a couple of the limited production XF-RS cars (tasty)

 

went to the one at Alameda Point:

http://singlelens.net/2013/jaguar/

 

looks like a blast!