A shooting brake is, in its original British sense, a two-door estate built for carrying, on the body of a sports car or grand tourer rather than a saloon. It takes a low, sporting shape and extends the roof back to a tailgate, so the car gains a load bay without losing its lines. Very often it was the work of a coachbuilder, built in tiny numbers to special order.

It is one of the most distinctively British corners of car design, bound up with country sport, coachbuilding and a certain kind of understatement, and it has had a long afterlife as a style that keeps being revived.

An orange Reliant Scimitar GTE sporting estate, front three-quarter view, parked beside a brick wall
A Reliant Scimitar GTE. The car that popularised the sporting estate, an everyday cousin of the coachbuilt shooting brake.

What a shooting brake is

The defining feature is the roof. Where a fastback tapers away to a point, this body keeps its roof running level back to the very tail, over a load area, and finishes in a tailgate. The front of the car can be pure coupe or grand tourer; the back is estate.

That combination is the whole appeal. It offers the practicality of an estate, an opening tail and a usable boot, much like a liftback, but on a two-door sporting body and usually with the finish and exclusivity of bespoke coachwork. It was never meant to be a cheap way to carry things. It was a way to carry things in style.

Where the name comes from

The term predates the motor car. A “brake”, sometimes spelled “break”, was a large horse-drawn carriage, and a shooting brake was the one kept for taking a shooting party out into the country, with room for the guns, the dogs and the day’s game.

When estates of this kind began to be built on motor-car chassis, often by the same coachbuilders who had bodied the carriages, the name carried over unchanged. That country-sport origin is why the type has always carried an air of the rural and the moneyed, rather than the suburban, however loosely the word gets used today.

British examples

The type is studded with memorable British examples, most of them rare:

  • The Aston Martin DB5 shooting brake was built in only a handful of examples, around a dozen, by the coachbuilder Harold Radford. The commission is usually credited to Aston’s chairman David Brown, who wanted a DB5 that could carry his dogs and guns.
  • The Reliant Scimitar GTE of 1968 did more than any other car to popularise the idea of the sporting estate for the ordinary buyer, and a long royal association gave it a profile far beyond its sales numbers.
  • The Lotus Elite of 1974 carried a shooting-brake silhouette into the wedge era, a four-seat Lotus with a long, practical tail.
  • The Jaguar XJS Lynx Eventer was a coachbuilt estate conversion of the XJ-S by Lynx Engineering in the 1980s, and is the car most often pointed to when British shooting brakes are discussed.

What ties them together is that each took a desirable sporting car and gave it a load bay, usually by hand and usually in very small numbers.

Shooting brake, estate or sporting estate?

The words have drifted over time. Strictly, the name belongs to the two-door, coachbuilt, sporting-bodied version, and a plain estate is the mass-produced four or five-door load-carrier based on a saloon. In between sits the “sporting estate”, the term the Scimitar GTE made its own: a factory-built car with estate practicality and sporting intent, but without the coachbuilt exclusivity of a true shooting brake.

Modern marketing has blurred all of this, and the phrase now gets attached to glamorous four-door estates that the original meaning would not have recognised. For the classic-car world, though, the older sense still holds: a shooting brake is a sports car or grand tourer that someone went to the trouble of giving a tailgate.