PH Blog: meeting the XJ220
Riggers's bedroom wall poster comes to life, 20 years down the line
Car looks good...
Never meet your heroes, the hoary old saying goes. It's a tired cliche, but the point that reality rarely lives up to your dreams is a fair one to make.
...Riggers looks nervous...
They then recited the litany of the anti-XJ220 catechism: 'It's got a metro V6, not the V12 it should have had; it was supposed to be four-wheel drive; the McLaren F1 and a recession made it obsolete more or less immediately; it drives like a truck.'
Blah, blah, ruddy-blah, as far as I was concerned. Because for - ooh - a good five years, a poster of a silver XJ220 took pride of place on my teenage bedroom wall. And the chance to get a go in something that stunning and which was, for however brief a time, the fastest production car in the world, was not something I was going to pass up.
Wallace and Law. Not at 180mph
In my case the experience was more than enhanced by the presence in the passenger seat of one Andy Wallace, Le Mans winner with Jaguar in the 80s and a development driver on the original XJ220 programme.
He had been scaring passengers silly on Jaguar's Gaydon test track and kindly played temporary cameraman for us (you'll see the results in the full feature - please don't expect Chris Harris levels of videography). And he was more than happy to chat about everything from the development of the XJ220 to how bloody scary Le Mans was before they put the chicanes in. A true gent.
XJ220S is pretty special...
This one was also the very first XJ220S, built by TWR using spare parts from Le Mans XJs - which means single-piece front and rear clamshells made from carbon fibre, Kevlar seats and some serious suspension - along with that small matter of the extra power.
And it felt as outrageous as it looked. With a smiling Justin Law at the wheel (a man who can take a V12 XJR-9 Le Mans car up the Goodwood Hill in just 44.1secs), the XJ220S simply exploded onto Jaguar's high-speed test track. He really didn't hang about, getting hard on the power along some of the long sweepers to counter mild understeer. At about 225km/h. At the fastest point we reached 285km/h, which I worked out to be around 177mph.
...But then so is the 'standard' car
Never meet your heroes, eh? On the basis of my first encounters with an XJ220, an XJ220S, and Messrs Wallace and Law, I don't think the cliche applies. Though perhaps given another chance I wouldn't make one of them play impromptu cameraman...
Riggers
Stunning looking things and would still destroy most things from a standing start, especially the S model.
(Just as an aside, something that shows how much things have changed since the early 90s. When the XJ220 appeared I imagine it was the most powerful production car in the world, but now it's probably beatable in 0-100mph sprints by the likes of the 911 Turbo S and Nissan GTR.)
But the XJ220 is a beautiful design - bit long (longer than my Audi A6!), but still gorgeous.
Many many years ago i was lucky enough to blag a ride in the original V12 engined monster - what a beast & a truly great pity that the car didnt end up with the V12 sitting in the back.
Also drove a standard production car on many occasions & i loved it. A big car, but a quick car which turned heads simply because not many people knew what it was at the time.
(Just as an aside, something that shows how much things have changed since the early 90s. When the XJ220 appeared I imagine it was the most powerful production car in the world, but now it's probably beatable in 0-100mph sprints by the likes of the 911 Turbo S and Nissan GTR.)
Absolutely love this car.
KP
Way back in the mid-90s Autocar did an interesting terminal speed test with some of the premier vehicles around then. The distance was 1 mile; from a standing start the F40 managed 177mph and the XJ220 either 180mph or 182mph. The observation was that the F40 absolutely flew up to around 170mph and then acceleration tailed off dramatically; the Jag's superior aerodynamics allowed it to just win because it didn't hit the same 'brick wall' as the Ferrari. (Autocar didn't have an F1 that day, but calculated that it could hit 197mph over a standing mile; on the airfield they used, it probably wouldn't have had enough space to stop though!)
I'm really putting my memory to the test now, because I remember reading in Performance Car (again, way back in the 90s) that the Jag's 542bhp official output was measured somewhere hot; in cooler temperatures the engine actually packs something closer to 600bhp even in standard form. It's certainly an amazing car in terms of straight line speed; for many years it was the only other car I was aware of that could do 0-100mph in less than 8 seconds (7.9?), and although I've never seen a video of it drag-racing against an F1 (is there such a thing?!), I imagine it could at least keep the McLaren F1 honest. For example (and again from memory), Autocar's road test of the F1 was at Bruntingthorpe, where they took the car up to 211mph; on the same airfield, I think Top Gear magazine got the XJ220 to 203mph - not bad over a longer distance.
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