The seven best car rear ends ever

Jaguar F-Type

The Jaguar F-Type was a very, very long time coming. From the end of the E-type in the 1970s there was a gap of more than three decades before Jaguar finally built up the courage to make a proper follow up. The long bonnet and sleek side profile normally take most of the attention, but we love to focus on that rear end. With slim lights below that lightly sloped rear it seems to come almost to a concept car-style point. Brought together with a gentle rear bumper and some very beefy hips it all just seems to work. The only real choice you have here is whether you should go for the R with its quad pipes, or the E-type-reminiscent central twins.

Lamborghini Miura SV

Sometimes simplicity is the best thing, and sometimes you really can’t improve on the first time someone did something. The Miura was the very first supercar and came with a very simple, but very effective, backside. The lights are very matter-of-fact rectangles, the rear window is not a window, it’s a series of slats, and below the word “Miura” and stylised “SV” is a plain black plastic bumper. If you say all those things it really doesn’t seem like the recipe for near perfection, but when you see them in real life on the Miura SV, it’s right there. Like the F-type (maybe inspiring it?) there’s a gently sloping rear, into an almost pointed back and some wide hips. Maybe it really is three things that make a great motoring backside: point, hips, slope?

Pagani Zonda

So a pointy back, a sloping rear deck and wide hips are the answer? Well the Zonda disagrees. Wide hips? Absolutely. Sloping rear? Well, sort of. Coming to a point? No. Absolutely not. The rear of the Pagani Zonda is bluff, almost sitting vertically behind those really extra-wide hips. The focus is brought right to those quad exhausts, set into a circular metal mount, they sit as a square of screaming V12 noise. The lights are again simple, mounted in a sort of off vertical diagonal and rather than a single piece of sloping metal or plastic the back is mesh, showing some of the mechanical workings of this Italian beast.

Chevrolet Corvette Sting Ray Split Window

Riding to my rescue of the three things that make a rear end truly great – coming to a near point, big wide hips and a rear deck gently sloping into it – is the original Corvette Sting Ray. This is one classic car when it feels like a lot of real thought went into the back as well as the front. The Sting Ray looks beefy compared to some of its other ‘60s supercar brethren, and sort of straddles the line between supercar and muscle car. But the rear is really rather elegant. The split rear windows are pretty useless in practical terms, but they look great from the outside, then the lights are simple circles, not taking up too much of the back, and the hip to slope ratio is back on point.

McLaren P1

Simple rear lights are something the McLaren P1, McLaren’s first hypercar since the F1 in 1994, does not have. But those lights are one of its best features. Rear wing up or down, it’s the extreme slope into the back through those ultra-thin lights that really takes the eye. Set above a central hexagonal exhaust and massive diffuser the lights are super thin, curving around the line of the rear vents. It’s a very simple addition to a very mechanical-looking rear end which we think works very well.

Aston Martin Vantage

In one of his videos, former GRR man and regular Goodwood racer Chris Harris said the old Aston Martin Vantage had one of the best backsides on a car ever. On this subject we must agree with the current Top Gear star. The old Vantage may have gotten very long in the tooth by the time it was finally shuffled aside for the new, shark-featured one, but it still had one of the finest rears a car had ever been seen. It conforms to most of our key backside rules too. The rear deck slopes gently rather than harshly, the rear lip on the bootlid brings it to a point of sorts and those hips are wide. The boomerang design of the rear lights only serves to set off the back magnificently. While the rest of the car has aged and is not quite as achingly pretty as it once seemed, the back is still absolutely on point.

Ferrari 250 GT SWB

Another entry for reasons behind our campaign for people to recognise that it is the 250 SWB that is the best looking Ferrari ever, rather than its GTO brethren. The rear of the SWB is a thing of simple beauty, especially if you can find one of the ones lacking the chrome bumper. A shapely rounded rump is finished with a set of ultra-simple rear lights and four, count them, four circular exhausts, all together it makes helps bring the car together as an achingly beautiful example of early Ferrari beauty. I like to imagine that when Pinin Farina finished the design he just leant back, let out a satisfactory sigh, motioned a chefs kiss and walked away.

Corvette image courtesy of Bonhams, 250 SWB photo by Nick Dungan.