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Takes Two to Tango!

I just about managed to squeeze in. Seated rather tight, my mind wandered to the three days that I went to a gym after paying for the full six-months package. I should’ve done the six-months, in hindsight. “I am one size too big for this thing. Maybe two,” I said to the mechanic struggling to clamp my seatbelt in. It felt like my shoulders would come off and hang from my hyoid bone.

It had been almost a decade since I got into a proper single-seater race car. And there I was, in a foreign land, ready to floor the pedal to see if I was still half as good as I used to be in my years of whatever little racing I’d done. No words can explain how tense I was. With no idea of what to expect, I listened carefully as Paul gave me instructions on how to get the car moving. “Don’t worry, you’re gonna be alright,” he said to me. I had just been forced to wear a Matador outfit and thrown into the arena to fight an annoyed bull. I’ll be alright – I keep repeating this statement, almost in sarcasm.

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The Sound of Music!

This was a couple of years back. I had a Jaguar F-Type for a week. It wasn’t the drunkard 500-and-few horsepower one. This was the substantially more docile and considerably less-drunk model — the one which is unimpressively called P300. 

The F-Type is offered with three power outputs to choose from: 300bhp (from a 2-litre, in-line-4), 450bhp and 575bhp (both from 5-litre V8s). Jaguar is great at many things but car-naming isn’t among them. The different trims of the F-Type are labelled as P300, P450 and P575. Some imagination, eh! Based on my experience, they should’ve been: ‘It’s fine’, ’This is nuts’, and ‘I shat myself.’

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BMW X5: Stupidly Good!

The first thing that caught my eye was the gear shift knob. More to the point, its crystal effect finish. The X is visible in a strange multi-dimensional way and it looks rather cool. 

And while we are on the topic of cool looking bits in the cabin, I’ll say that the combination of the camel coloured upholstery and the black themed dashboard looks rich enough. The wood panelling may look a bit rough, but it’s a different and interesting finish. I like it a lot.

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Ashish JhaLeave a comment

Jaguar F-Type: Bundle of joy, and scare!

It’s always hard to think of the appropriate story to start one’s blog with. I had no such issue. It was pretty straight forward — I’d write about that one car which scared me the most in the past decade. And the one which didn’t. Ironically, they’re both Jaguar F-Type.

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