This is the most exciting sports car news of 1961. In late January, Jaguar Managing Director Sit William Lyons gave the go-ahead to plans to announce the XKE at New York's International Automobile Show. With countless miles of racing at Le Mans and road testing at England's MIRA proving ground, Jaguar is finally building a sports car directly descended from its competition experience. The 150-mph XKE will be available in closed or open form, both models powered by the 265 bhp, 3.8-liter XK six- cylinder engine. It will be no surprise to anyone if a team of XKE roadsters appears at Le Mans in June - in full-race trim.

At the moment, the Coventry factory is in an unusual and envious position among British car manufacturers. Bill Lyon's firm is practically the only one in the U.K. enjoying full production and an ever-increasing demand for its cars that is never quite able to meet. While larger English factories go onto two- and three-day weeks and management bends over backwards to keep labor happy, Jaguar production lines hum. Every effort is made to increase capacity. But the Jaguar story - the Bill Lyons Story - has always been like this, and he is now about to write one of the most exciting chapters of all.

Rumors about the XKE have been flying for months. When Briggs Cunningham entered one of the prototypes at Le Mans last year, tongues wagged even harder, and it was thought that its introduction was imminent. In actuality the Cunningham effort at Le Mans set the XKE announcement back several months, for this car that Briggs "borrowed" from the experimental shop was an important test vehicle, incorporating most of the features now introduced on the XKE. Driven by Walt Hansgen and Dan Gurney, it suffered from several weaknesses -mostly in the fuel handling department - and eventually succumbed to engine trouble associated with the fuel injection system on t he experimental engine. Its later experiences in the U.S., again driven by Walt Hansgen and entered by Briggs Cunningham, were no happier.

But the tale of the XKE begins not at Le Mans last year. It began with the racing D, the car with which British drivers (notably Mike Hawthorne) made history at Le Mans. With the D-Type, Jaguar began gathering pages of data that relate directly to the car being shown for the first time in New York this month. One might conveniently call the XKE a "production D", but this oversimplification doesn't really do the new Jaguar justice. The ill-fated XK-SS was that, and it was a very hairy-chested, almost-full-race machine, indeed. The XKE, on the other hand, is a tractable, comfortable, high-speed, sports-touring car.

Jaguar aerodynamicist Malcolm Sayer (formerly with Bristol Aircraft) has outdone himself with the new XKE, a tribute to pure, near perfect form. It's not beautiful from every angle, but wonderfully efficient nevertheless, and he and his staff have created a sports car that even Stuttgart will stop and look at.

The shape of the 1960 Cunningham Le Mans car is the shape of the XKE, and Sayer told me that had the regulations for last year's race not specified a full-width windshield, it would have been the "cleanest" Jaguar yet. The test program for the new car included wind tunnels experiments, with scale models as well as full-size automobiles, and one test vehicle was put in the massive Farnborough tunnel.