Believe it or not, the Jaguar F-Type has been on the market for eight straight years without the customary nip and tuck. That’s a lot, even for a sports car that usually gets to live longer than your run-of-the-mill sedan - the best example here is the Nissan 370Z, which still marches on to this day. The 2021 F-Type, however, will come to fix that as Jaguar is looking to revamp its range-topper in order to keep customer interest high, and there have been suggestions that it will be derived from the Aston Martin Vantage.}

Well, fellas, that couldn’t be more wrong. In fact, those presumptions have stemmed from an unofficial rendering based on Jaguar’s F-Type mules spotted in various areas of the world during their pre-production testing, tuning, and tweaking.

There’s even a YouTube video uploaded by TFLnow that shows two F-Type prototypes up close, including what looks like a redesigned front end with longer and narrower headlights that stretch towards the back, in a quasi-similar way to those of the Aston Martin Vantage.

The camouflage foil is too thick to reveal anything, and if we’ve learned something during all these years of renderings that pop up online, it’s that they’re almost never spot on when it comes to guessing the actual design of an upcoming model. Heck, Toyota Supra’s headlights look more like the Vantage’s. So, please, make the childish rumors stop.

Now, there are a lot of missing pieces from the 2021 Jaguar F-Type puzzle. Sure, the headlights and taillights will get a redesign, as will most likely the F-Type’s front end and derriere. However, the sports car will flaunt the same roofline, side profile, and pillar layout, hence our argument that this is most likely a mid-life refresh.

While we’re at it, let’s also touch on the performance factor - the F-Type is, first and foremost, a sports car, and customers will want to feel that while they’re driving it. At the time of writing, the F-Type could be had in various flavors. The entry-level model is motivated by a 2.0-liter turbo-four making 296 horsepower, while above it sits a 3.0-liter supercharged V-6 that can churn out either 340 horsepower or 380 horsepower, depending on your trim choice.

At the top of the food chain sits the F-Type R packing a 5.0-liter V-8 making 550 horsepower and the F-Type SVR, which extracts 575 horsepower from the same powerplant. However, for the tweaked model, we expect Jaguar to actually turn things up a notch and get its engineers to breathe more grunt into the straight-four and the V-6 mills. } The unit powers some of BMW’s new models and can crank out up to 617 horsepower inside the M8, yet Jaguar will most likely detune the engine to around 600 horsepower for the SVR.

Jaguar F-type engine lineup

How the interior of the F-Type will evolve is still a mystery. The video we mentioned before shows that the cockpit topography will stay the same, although we also expect Jaguar to fit the F-Type with some sort of digital instrument cluster that would add a more modern twist to the British sports car’s ethos.