https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/features/jaguar-xj220-30-why-v6-misfit-now-legend
Want to own an example of that extraordinary breed of supercars that time after time broke all performance records in a 10-year spell from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s? I’m afraid they’re all gone: any decent Ferrari F40 or F50, Porsche 959, Bugatti EB110 or McLaren F1 now requires a seven-digit investment. Apart from one.
Despite being built in similarly microscopic numbers to the GTO and 959, despite being as quick or quicker than any save the F1, despite class-winning Le Mans heritage and despite being one of the most drop-dead gorgeous cars ever created, a Jaguar XJ220 can be bought today for around £400,000. A lot, I grant, but a fraction of what’s required to secure any of the others.
It’s hard to believe it’s 30 years since Jaguar launched its ill-starred supercar, 34 since it first appeared in V12, four-wheel-drive concept form at the Birmingham show, and 29 since this title became the first and only magazine to conduct a full road test evaluation of a factory-supplied car.
This car, as it happens. Now owned by XJ220 guru Don Law, it needs very little introduction here: J999 JAG is the very first production XJ220; it was Tom Walkinshaw’s own company car and the car he supplied to us to do that road test, which we then promptly crashed, the story of which you can read overleaf.
First, though, let’s pause awhile to remember what we have here. On the one hand, it’s a traditional supercar – low, dramatic, impractical and fast. On the other, it’s so much more than that: to this day, the most rapid Jaguar road car ever built and a car that changed so much from concept to reality that Jaguar took reluctant depositors to court to make them pay up. It also won the GT class at Le Mans in 1993 before being cruelly disqualified for having its catalytic converters removed. Not that cats were even sti[CENSORED]ted in the rules, just that the road car had them, so the race car should have had them, too.
The fuss from investors concerned the replacement of the 48-valve V12 of the concept with a 3.5-litre V6 turbo motor or, if you take the contrary view, it provided them with the perfect excuse in a recession to back out of a commitment made in a bull market. No matter that this engine had won races at the highest level in TWR Jaguar XJR-10 and XJR-11 racing prototypes.
And it was fast. A 0-60mph time of 3.6sec is still rapid today, but consider it was achieved without four-wheel drive, traction control or launch control, but with tyres made from concrete by modern standards and a slow, manual gearbox. So let’s look at times against that brand-new yet perennial benchmark, the Porsche 911 GT3.
Because of its traction advantage and flappy paddles, the Porsche outpaces the Jag from rest until they post identical 0-140mph times of 14.9sec. But the in-gear times tell a rather different story. Look at the 20mph increments above 60mph, when traction no longer holds the Jag back, and from 60-80mph to 130-150mph (the highest recorded for the Porsche), the Jaguar is not just quicker but wildly so, gapping the 911 by 0.5sec on average over each tiny 20mph sprint.
It was the first car we ever tested that could run a 150-170mph time within the confines of Millbrook’s Mile Straight, too, and as the bloke who was at the wheel at the time, it’s not an experience you forget.