Pussy-footing through the Far North in Jaguar’s sharpest-clawed coupe. Jealous yet?

Price: $214,900.

Powertrain and economy: 5.0 litre supercharged petrol V8, 423kW/700Nm, eight-speed automatic, AWD, combined 10.7l/100km, 252g/km.

Vital statistics: 4475mm long, 1923mm wide, 1308mm high, 2622mm wheelbase, luggage capacity 310 litres, 20-inch alloy wheels 305/30 tyres.

We like: Awesome grunt, chassis balance, styling updates.

We don’t like: Slow infotainment screen responses, coarse chip harshness wearying, not as loud as it used to be, having a stern co-driver.

DEPARTING at sunrise was a heartbreak … and, yet, also so heart-warming.

As a spot in which you’d want to be to enjoy the start of a brand-new day, Doubtless Bay is pretty much unbeatable. Doubtless Bay Villas, all the more so.

The past 48 hours had been brilliant, taking it easy in a car that could have made this trip one huge rush.

Eight years is a lifetime in the car world, but Jaguar’s F-Type maintains a youthfulness that belies its age and a recent facelift has so deftly ironed the obvious wrinkles it still looks fantastic enough to keep turning heads and dropping jaws.

The wide, short, low and taut dimensions are pure sports car; so too the snug cabin in which the driving position feels just right. The F-Type's designer, Ian Callum, has moved on but there’s no reason why his opus needs to.

The P575 R format I’m driving is now the new flagship. With four-wheel-drive and a 423kW version of the supercharged V8 that has been with the car from the start, it’s a serious piece of kit; so much so that it’s ironic that one revision for 2020 has been to reduce the famous flare and blare on start-up.

While it announces less stridently when awakened – well, at least within Jaguar terms (there’s still rumble, but less neighbourhood window shake) - anything with this much power is going to be interesting and the V8 is massively potent when it comes on song, with 0-100kmh just 3.7 seconds away and a 300kmh top speed also achievable, according to this maker.

And when push comes to shove, it returns to being as outrageously vocal as ever, blaring under power, crackling, popping and fizzing on the over-run.

This much I learn when driving it in isolation around the Auckland area in the spare time before I head to the airport to pick up Mrs B, who has given me the day to myself before flying in.

I’m not saying at-the-wheel fun time is completely over from that point, yet it’s fair to say that, from that point on, the car was operated in a less adventuresome way. Jaguar’s drive modes do not include anything marked ‘tenderfoot’, but if they did, that’s where we would have been. My co-pilot has very firm convictions about where and where such potency can be unleashed. And it’s on her watch.

This trip was all about relaxation, a chance to take four days away from our respective work stations to breathe the good air, eat the good food and, after the car was put away for the night, enjoy the good drinks.

No better place to do all that than the last of three overnight hideaways. The Hilton on Auckland’s waterfront has been fun, the Waterfront Paihia homely … but Doubtless Bay Villas (doubtlessbayvillas.co.nz) was truly the best, saved for last.

Snuggled on a hillside overlooking the most beautiful maritime outlook in the Far North, an hour from the Bay of Islands, is a luxury complex comprising modern self-contained and serviced villas which sleep up to six. So, room aplenty for the two of us.

We’re feeling rightly chuffed to have one of the prime sea view duplexes, a score made easy from being friends with the custodians.

John and Sue Oxley might be familiar to you as well. He’s a celebrated name from the motoring journalism beat, here and previously in South Africa, where his wife was a high-up on the other side of the fence, as an industry comms specialist.

Anyway, after a grand life on the fast lane, they’ve gone into property management, this taking them to the Coromandel, then Brisbane and now to what would outwardly seem the ultimate lifestyle job.

Well, appearances and all that … assuredly, there’s plenty to keep them busy because this is a five-star property where great care and attention goes into keeping everything ‘just right’. And, yet, this couple readily agrees it’s all the easier when located in the warmest part of New Zealand. When we turn up, John’s in summer wear … quite a sight for those of us who, two days earlier, had been waking to heavy frosts. Well, it’s not called the ‘Winterless North’ for nothing.

Bringing the Jaguar here also feels ‘right’ because it’s exactly the kind of property car brands love to use as an event showcase. Indeed, several have already. They’ll doubtless be as impressed as we were that it’s just been awarded the prestigious HotelsCombined Recognition of Excellence Award for 2020, with an almost-perfect score of 9.6 out of 10, based on guest ratings.

 “The big thing about the villas is that they offer an island life-style without leaving New Zealand,” says John.

“With waving palms, views across the attractive Cable Bay beach and out to sea Doubtless Bay Villas offers the perfect getaway from the stresses of daily life,” he impresses.

“You can either chill out in your villa and listen to the ocean, or you can jump in your car and explore the area, including the beautiful KariKari peninsula, or even drive right to the top of New Zealand at Cape Reinga, where not only will you see where two oceans meet, but you will feel the spiritual energy of this sacred place.

“As a motoring journalist for more than 50 years I travelled the world, and I have been to many, many beautiful places, but this is where I have chosen to finally hang up my driving gloves, and have changed my driving boots  for tennis shoes. It’s a great place to be.”

In saying that, my pal also concurs the Jaguar offers up quality accommodation, too. Naturally enough, he knows this brand well, and is intrigued to check out all the updates arriving with the refresh.

Technically this is a facelift, realistically cognoscenti might call it more than that, given the extent of the overhaul, which includes a visual restyling of such magnitude it has become quite a different looking car, at least when viewed front-on, to the one it supersedes.

Much slimmer headlight units and a reshaped grille serve to provision a very different face, and one that seems more aggressive, especially at this level. That vast aluminium bonnet - an impressive feat of production - lends illusion of the car having an even longer nose, though the overall vehicle length is unchanged.

Aesthetic alterations to the rear of the car are less dramatic, which is no bad thing. They got that right from the get-go. However, slimmer tail lights that incorporate the 'chicane' signature first seen on the brand’s impressive electric car, the I-Pace, sit well here.

The interior also updates as comprehensively; it’s now all-digital, with a 12.3-inch display ahead of the steering wheel that’s highly configurable to and includes a shift light when driving in manual mode.

The 10-inch infotainment system is much improved with the addition of Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, which at least allows you to circumvent a lot of the JLR proprietary stuff. I found early on that it was far more preferable using the mapping on my phone for navigation rather than the in-car system because the latter was slow and, also, seemed unable to find some of the addresses that Google knew of and located in a flash.

This edition also takes sportier 'Performance' seats that feature taller shoulder supports and are very embracing. The age of the car and, one supposes, its electronics shows perhaps in the absence of every cutting-edge driver assistance. The one you might want to see but don’t is adaptive cruise control. As much as I accept that sports cars should be especially ‘hands-on’ machines, it’ll likely lose sales because of this alone. It would also benefit from a head-up display.

Of course, is saying that, having to accept a certain degree of concession is just part of the ownership experience. For instance, there’s no disguising that it is designed wholly as a sports car – what’s harder to quantify is exactly what kind of sports car it really is.

One the one hand, it still expresses a fair degree of old-boy posh. On the other, it’s very cosseting and, for all that the trim is very luxurious, the equipment level as a whole is more tailored towards matters relating to hard-out driving than abject comfort.

That much enforces when you slip into it. The styling might project this as being a large model, but in reality it’s a car you virtually wear. The dimensions are tight and the two-seat cabin is quite snug.

So is the boot. We’d determined to pack light for four days and three nights on the road, but I hadn’t taken into account that our weekend luggage would come to include a Lego Land Rover Defender model, a surprise gift from the brand for attending the launch of that vehicle on day one of this trip.

The kit in finished form would have taken up much less space than the box it comes in but that wasn’t going to happen – assembly is a job of several days’ non-stop work.

Naturally, I was hardly going to leave it behind, but what to do with it? The only two places the box would fit were the passenger side footwell or the boot. The first was out of the question; the second raised different challenges once our weekend luggage also figured. We only had a single suitcase of the type that easily fits in an aircraft overhead locker, but the first time I tried to get everything in, the bootlid wouldn’t close.

Fortunately, Mrs B worked out that by putting the Lego in first, stowing my laptop bag on top of it and the (heavier) suite case to its side, then stashing our coats with other odds and ends - including the ‘essentials’ of a couple of bottles of wine – on top and whereever they’d go did the trick.

All had to be somehow squeezed in because there’s utterly no real room in the cabin for anything like that. It’s a real capsule; even m’lady’s handbag had to go into the boot.

As much as everything about this edition’s fit-out speaks to it being finessed for feral fun foremost, driving out of Auckland on the motorway raised false hope about the car’s comfort; but any impression of it being something of a grand tourer only lasted until we found a change of surface; the car physically altered the moment it transitioned from smooth tarmac onto more coarse chipped surfaces.

Road noise climbed to the point where we had to turn up the volume of the audio to overcome the tyre-induced roar and, even in its softest mode, the suspension was still transmitting any surface irregularities into the seats and bodies. It’s not an unduly harsh-riding car to threaten to realign your bones, but they’ll certainly get rattled enough to remind that, you’re out to enjoy a Jaguar with a magic carpet ride, you’d be better served by the four-door models.

Again, though, it’s not as if you shouldn’t expect it. Everything about it shouts out as a sports car, starting with how you sit in it: Impression you’re essentially sitting right on the ground, arms and legs outstretched with that massive bonnet arcing out the front, was enforced when I went to put the car away in the Paihia stop’s underground carpark.

The impression of it having a race-ready stance was proven to be far from illusionary. My prudence of entering this at barely walking speed was justified when I heard an awful momentary graunch as the car went through the dip at the ramp’s bottom; fortunately, it wasn’t the super-fancy carbon fibre lip spoiler that touched the concrete but a lower-set and assuredly hugely less expensive plastic piece. Still, the relief of extricating it the next day without reoccurrence was great.

Given that everything about this car leaves impression it will spaghetti speed limits at a snap, perhaps the biggest surprise about this package is that the drivetrain has enough docility to continence reasonably refined and fluid urban and 100kmh driving.

Some might even say the transmission is a little too relaxed: certainly, in the least aggressive drive mode it prefers to stretch the torque of the engine as far as possible rather that deliver instant kick down. That’s remarkable, given that another update has been to the calibration; the shift action is now supposed to be akin that that delivered on the very special Project-8 sports sedan that is pretty much designed purely for track driving.

Of course, you need just give it a touch more throttle – or, in fact, just snip it into the ‘race-flag’ identified driving modes – to find the car’s true self. There’s good reason why this variant’s 20-inch rims are clad with stupendously wide tyres and why it has massive brakes and comes only with all-wheel-drive.

Some might decry the lack of a rear-wheel-drive option, and the resultant lack of tail happiness, but assuredly all-paw power distribution makes for a far more exploitable machine. Potentially, a more enjoyable one, too: It would be hugely troubled to get all of that power down to the ground safely in such a compact car, with such a short wheelbase.

On that strength, a shout out, too, for Jaguar’s Intelligent Driveline Dynamics system, which also earns its keep. Even the car’s weight adds a sense of security; it certainly feels nicely pinned down because of it. And yes, for sure, that something as compact as this is clocking close to two tonnes might outwardly seem to be a slight concern – or, at least, have you wondering how much heavier it could have become without the obvious savings delivered by its alloy body parts – rest assured it has more than enough oomph to maintain a power-to-weight outcome that very much tips the scales toward punch over presumed paunch.

In many ways, the further you go in the F-Type, the harder it is to define its persona. Not surprising, really.

After all, you’re getting elegance and extravagance in look but a whole lot of rawness in feel. If you allow it.

In hindsight, a trip that was such a treat for us was hardly the same for the car. We stuck to the easiest roads – not always by choice, flooding just the week before had ruined opportunity to take the most scenic routes which in better conditions would have been great with the lack of international tourists – and never pushed it, save for when passing the very occasional meandering camper van asked for a throttle squeeze. That’s all it took for a quick dash past.

That I even almost matched the officially cited optimal overall fuel burn of 10.7 litres per 100km fuel economy revealed the full extent of my folly.

Owners need to think about what they’re taking on. As much as the national driving condition pegs thoroughbreds such as this back to show pony status, it really does deserve at least occasional opportunity to run fast and free. Track day outings would be the answer.