Jaguar's most extreme performance car ever has just stamped its authority on the Nurburgring – again – beating its own record and belting out a time a whopping seven seconds faster than any other four-door production car has managed. All hail the world's fastest family sedan.
Jaguar's XE S is no slouch in its own right – a family-sized executive sedan making 335-odd horses, whose light, stiff body and RWD chassis makes it a surprisingly precise weapon for fast and fun driving in the mountains. But, egged on by a pile of cash from Indian giant Tata, which has owned the brand since 2008, the company started a new Special Vehicle Operations center and set about making a bare-knuckled Mr. Hyde to the standard car's dashing Jekyll.
Out with the three-liter supercharged V6, then, and in with a five-liter blown V8 making a very un-gentlemanly 600 hp. Off with the regular bodywork, and on with a full set of carbon, including a mildly obscene rear wing as well as forged 20-inch rims. The suspension, hardly a weak point of the XE S, got a good seeing-to, dropping the car half an inch and stiffening it up, much like one's upper lip, with adjustable dampers.
The seats were replaced with something much racier and Alcantara-covered, and the option was given to turf out the rear seats altogether in favor of a roll bar for racetrack work. And thus, we're left with the Jaguar XE SV Project 8, a 200-mph (322-km/h) four-door supercar, with two of said doors literally leading nowhere. Jolly fun.
A year ago, the mighty Project 8 became the fastest four-door production car ever around the Nurburgring. And now, it's beaten its own record by 2.9 seconds, with development driver Vincent Radermecker cracking the whip. The second-placed Mercedes-Benz AMG GT 63 S ran the 'ring in 7:25.41, and now, this jaunty Jag has wrung out a time of 7:18.36.
Quite why you'd want to buy yourself a four-door automobile with two seats remains a mystery, but there's nowt as queer as folk, as they say, and the Project 8's recent hijinks now place it as the 27th fastest production car of any kind around the 'ring, with plenty of Ferraris, Corvettes, Nissans, Porsches, Gumpers, Maseratis and even Paganis trailing behind.
Source: Jaguar Land Rover