Jaguar SS100

More of a sports car design than any modern sports car

To today’s eyes it is an archetypal 1930s sports car design: raffishly sporting with a hood half its length underscored by flowing front fenders that arc back from the large spoked wheels right at the very front. Antique though it is, this Jaguar design is more wheel and engine than a more recent design car; it’s proportions are more about power and speed than any modern. Yet unlike post-war sports-car speed-forms, the SS100 stands to attention and holds your gaze with up-right windscreen and front facia, and a confident stare from its huge round lights. 
And as you get closer to this Jaguar — whose more fulsome and famous predecessors the XK120/40/50 and E-Type still shadow the attention this simpler design might have otherwise — we see its scuttle sweep into the door echoing the both front and rear fenders, just as slats on the side of the hood echo the angle of the windscreen and door shut — their slender lines also chiming with the fine wheel spokes and grille mesh. And we see exquisite auxiliary lights, headlamp braces, grille, windscreen support, and interior too. 
Many European sports car brands existed before the 2nd World War, and most of them produced cars that followed much the same design formula as this rarely seen Jaguar, but none realised it so perfectly.