Malcolm Sayer and the Jaguar E-Type

Sayer studied aeronautical and automotive engineering at Loughborough College and in 1938 went to the Bristol Aeroplane Company at Filton, where he worked through the war. In the late 1940s he went to Baghdad to teach engineering. In 1950 he joined Jaguar, after an interview with its chief engineer, William Heynes, whose recollection Jaguar World gives: "I quite took to him and said, 'Yes, we'll give you a job'".

His first Jaguar shapes were racing ones. He drew the C-type's body for its tubular frame, and the bubble canopy and undertray that helped Dewis to his record at Jabbeke in a modified XK120 in 1953 were his idea. Then came the D-type, the Le Mans winner, and from it, through the experimental cars E1A and E2A, the E-Type (the prototypes page has them). Another aerodynamicist gave him his place in 1984:

MoMA's curator put the difference in one sentence.

The engineers gave him four fixed dimensions, height, length, width and ground clearance, and he calculated the body's curves as ellipses, passing the co-ordinates to the men who shaped the panels. Tom Jones, of Jaguar's styling department, told MoMA that Sayer "kept his mathematical formula for design a secret and in fact died before anyone else learned it". Sayer himself claimed to have learned it from a German professor while teaching in Iraq; Jaguar World noted in 2015 that the story cannot be confirmed. Bob Knight, the suspension engineer, put the principle more simply to MoMA: "Proportions are the first necessity. If the proportions are wrong, you might as well go home."

He disliked being called a stylist; his family's site gives his retort, "I'm not a hairdresser!" He tested what he calculated. Models went into wind tunnels, the D-type into the big tunnel at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough, and at MIRA he taped wool tufts to the bodywork and watched them from a second car.⁠source 2​source 1​source 10​source 14

The shape was Sayer's. Jaguar said so at the 50th anniversary in 2011, and MoMA in 1996. But three other hands are on the car, and the honest answer names them.

• The engineering was done by the team under William Heynes. Motor Sport credited Heynes's design team when it introduced the car in April 1961, and Bob Knight designed its independent rear suspension.

• The last word on its looks was Sir William Lyons's. MoMA wrote that Lyons "maintained for himself the title of Chief Stylist, which assured him final authority on all designs", and Motor Sport in 2007 called the outline "Malcolm Sayer-penned, Sir William Lyons-refined".

• The coupé came by another route. The fixed-head coupé's roof and tailgate began as Bob Blake's mock-up, which Lyons approved and refined; Sayer then drew the production shape. That account is the Jaguar Heritage Trust's, which quotes Blake that Sayer "later drew the shape … and corrected all my errors".

MoMA's own record of its E-Type credits three men: Lyons, Sayer and Heynes.

Sayer did not like everything that followed. MoMA judged that the later cars, the 2+2 and the Series 2 and 3, deviated "increasingly from Sayer's original design", and his daughter remembered his reaction to the bulge a bigger engine needed in the bonnet (hood): "It's not supposed to be there!"

He went on working on low-drag shapes: the factory's Low Drag Coupé of 1962, and the mid-engined XJ13, his last racing shape. He made the first studies for the car that became the XJ-S. He died in Leamington Spa on 22 April 1970, before the Series 3 E-Type was announced, and Motor Sport called the XJ-S, in 1975, his "last styling monument".

A blue plaque marks his home in Leamington Spa, and a plaque marks his birthplace in Cromer (2008).⁠source 1​source 2​source 6​source 10​source 16​source 11​source 8