What is it?
Sales of the track-hardened, Nürburgring lap time-beating Jaguar XE SV Project 8 have been slow, despite there being a limited production run of just 300 examples. In an effort to shift the remaining examples, Jaguar identified the desire among potential punters for a less extreme, road-biased version, so now we have this new Touring model.
What’s new? Not a lot, really. The big change is to the aerodynamics, with the deletion of the huge, downforce-generating spoiler at the rear, which is replaced by a far more subtle lip on the trailing edge of the tailgate. To rebalance the forces, there’s also a new splitter at the front. Oh, and the top speed has been pegged back from 200mph to 186mph in deference to the resulting reduction in very high-speed stability. Anything else? Well, you can only have the car in this configuration with the back seats in place, so no two-seat, roll cage-equipped Track Pack option here.
The rest of the car is unchanged, which means it’s the same bespoke-built machine as before. There’s less aero, but the wide-arched body is still bristling with intent and still only features the roof and door skins from the standard Jaguar XE.
Power comes from the familiar 592bhp supercharged 5.0-litre V8 that drives all four wheels through an eight-speed automatic gearbox. The front and rear tracks have been widened by 24mm and 73mm respectively, while the double-wishbone suspension gets niceties such as recalibrated adaptive dampers and anti-roll bars, billet suspension knuckles and squidge-free ball joints. Finally, the 20in wheels are wrapped in Michelin Pilot Cup 2 tyres and fit over vast carbon-ceramic disc brakes.
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YES - Buy one
"Should I buy one?" -
Yes. Without a doubt, a true Petrolhead will 'ave a owned a Jag and an Alfa. And this is a proper Jag, if not a modern flavour of the XJR...
Chuffed they deleted the Yobbo-wing on the boot
Old interior
and old head and taiights, too. Shame they couldn’t incorporate these with all the changes to the sheet metal they’ve made anyway.
this car never made any sense
this car never made any sense to me,
why spend all that development time fitting the V8 in the XE and then charge £150 grade for it? instead of making a proper R version XE at M3 money and have a halo car that gives the rest of the XE range street cred ........... (if they had bothered to design a real Jaguar interior for the whole range in the first place of course!).