Back in the big cat

As many as 75 customers wanted out, but had signed contracts committing them to buying the car, which Jaguar was keen to enforce. Given Jaguar only planned to make 350 examples of its mid-engined supercar, this was a sizeable constituency.

The customers sought to free themselves from their obligations by pointing out the car no longer had the 48-valve V12 motor seen in the original concept at the Birmingham motor show four years earlier, and therefore could not be said to be the same car they had committed to buying. Some even said it wasn’t a Jaguar engine, though as the downsized V6 was already winning races on both sides of the Atlantic in TWR Jaguar XJR-10 and XJR-11 sports prototypes, that contention was perhaps a little harder to stand up.

In fact this twin-turbo, 24-valve, quad-cam racing V6 had started life as a pushrod V8 designed by General Motors for use by Buick and then made famous by its use in countless Rovers, Range Rovers, TVRs and others.

But that is another story. Jaguar was convinced the customers were merely looking for an excuse and that they’d only placed their deposits with a view to ‘flipping’ their cars soon after purchase and realising a healthy profit. So they went to court. Suing your customers was a highly original, some might say unorthodox move for a large car company to make, and good never seemed likely to result.

So, yes, while Jaguar won its case, victories rarely come more Pyrrhic than this. That, plus the recession meant the car was doomed. In the end just 282 of the 350 cars were built, which doesn’t sound too bad, but many took an age to shift and then only at often eye-watering discounts.

It would be the following summer before I got to drive one, and did so in my capacity as Autocar’s Road Test Editor. It was therefore my job to deliver what we were told would be the only full road test, complete with comprehensive performance figures, which the factory was going to sanction. The car provided would be Tom Walkinshaw’s own, as his TWR company has been charged with designing, developing and building the car. It was also the very first production XJ220.

But first we had to take some photographs and do some driving, so we toddled off to the Black Mountain in the Brecon Beacons to do both. For benchmarking purposes – and because we thought it would be fun – we took a Ferrari 512TR along with us too. The Jaguar was amazing, possessing a level of performance in another category entirely to that of the Ferrari, which was itself then just about the fastest thing any of us had driven. The XJ220 gripped better than any in my experience too and on wide, fast open roads proved to be one of those cars that allows you to learn not only about it, but something of yourself along the way.

By the time we reached the quarry where we were to do our sunset shots, we’d picked up a couple of hangers on, a well-meaning couple in a Vauxhall Cavalier if memory serves. But we really just needed to get on, so decided to do what they most wanted and take them for a run over the mountain in the cars, after which they would then depart.

So we did, driving the Ferrari and Jaguar in a manner designed to fully demonstrate their performance. Once done, we were bidding farewell when the man explained he had to leave in order to go to work. What business was it, we wondered, that required him to clock on at such an unusual time? ‘I’m a traffic cop,’ he replied with a smile, ‘working nights.’ And with that he was gone.

The next day we headed east across Wales and England towards the Millbrook test track in Bedfordshire. I was in the Ferrari, and it was my inability to match the pace of Jaguar that alone spared me the same fate, as I was about 100 yards back on a road of which we had full knowledge, in the middle of which and around a curve someone had just built a roundabout of which we had none.

I saw the smoke from the Jaguar’s locked front tyres long before I saw the offending obstacle, which is the only reason I was able to slow sufficiently to negotiate it. The Jaguar driver was less lucky and elected not to bother trying, but instead launch the XJ220 over this unforeseen item of rogue street furniture.

Up and over it went, clattering down the other side to a halt where its driver and I surveyed the damage. There had been a mighty thump as the tyres had banged into the wheel arches and there were some broken pieces of spoiler at the front, but not only did it look almost normal from a distance, everything still seemed to be pointing in the right direction. TWR clearly built them strong. So we swapped cars and at a somewhat less enthusiastic pace, resumed our journey.

Upon arrival we were met by Fi Miller, who was at the time none other than Tom Walkinshaw’s PA. He had decided to helicopter in to see his car perform. We had no choice but to confess to our sins, after which I asked her how Tom was likely to react. ‘Either you’ll be fine,’ she estimated, ‘or God help you.’ Tom never did do middle grounds.

Whether we caught him on a good day or he was mindful of the still unwritten pages of the test to come, not to mention all the cars that had yet to be sold, I will never know. All I do know is that having been appraised of the situation by a very contrite road tester, Tom put his arms around the forlorn chap’s shoulder and said, ‘don’t worry laddie, shit happens’. And the next day sent us a simply enormous bill.

The car today is owned by Don Law, is in perfect condition after a lengthy restoration and has recently been driven to the west coast of Ireland by Don’s son and formidable historic Jaguar racer, Justin. Don is Mr XJ220, and there were at least 14 there when I visited recently, including race cars and at least one 680bhp XJ220S, which is effectively a road-going version of the car in which David Coulthard won the GT category of Le Mans in 1993 before being disqualified on a mean-minded technicality.

But J999 JAG has been left exactly as it was when we last met almost 30 years ago. Styled by Keith Helfet, its shape is no less beautiful today than it was back then. Indeed the cleanness of its lines are perhaps even more arresting when compared to modern winged, finned and slatted supercars.

Inside it feels its age. The doors don’t open far enough, there’s Ford parts bin switchgear everywhere, zero storage space and control weights attuned to those used to getting their daily exercise in a boxing ring. The dials are dim, but there’s no shortage of them: in front of you there’s a speedo and rev-counter with four smaller gauges to the left showing oil temperature and pressure, water temperature and fuel level. Which would be enough for most. But no, mounted on the door are four more: a clock, an ammeter, a boost gauge and one final display providing invaluable information about your gearbox temperature.

Strangely, you don’t forget. I knew exactly how this car would drive from the moment I sank back down into that seat. The gearbox with its weighty, methodical shift quality and gearing high enough for five ratios to span a 215mph speed range. The hefty unassisted steering with its joke lack of lock. The poor over the shoulder visibility, the gravelly, chain-driven voice of the V6. It’s all precisely as I recall. Even the one thing I had expected to have changed – my perception of the car’s width – remains. At over two metres from side to side it was wide then and remains so today.

And it’s still quick. Bloody quick. You can’t compare standing start acceleration figures gathered then to those recorded today because they take no account of all the assistance systems – be it four-wheel drive, traction control, launch control, flappy paddles, sticky tyres, some, more or all of the above – that have evolved in the interim.

Compare instead Autocar data giving short 20mph increments above 60mph when the Jag has established full traction and use that benchmark of benchmarks, a brand new Porsche 911 GT3 as your measuring stick. And you learn that all the way from 60-80mph, up to 130-150mph (the highest speed recorded by the Autocar team for the GT3) the Jaguar is on average 0.5sec quicker over increments that took it, also on average, just 3.3sec to complete. And that’s a massive difference.

It feels it. The old school Garrett T3 turbos take time to spool up, positive boost registering from around 2000rpm but not giving their all until around 4500rpm, at which point in second gear you’re wondering if the re-manufactured Bridgestone rear boots will break traction despite their massive 345mm width. They will if you hit a small bump, but otherwise it just fires you across the countryside, any diminished sense in the physical sensation created by exposure to modern high performance machinery more than offset by the knowledge that it is being delivered by a car built in the same year Nigel Mansell became Britain’s most successful Formula 1 racing driver.

In the wet, as it largely was on the day I drove it, you have to be far more circumspect. Full throttle in anything other than the top two gears will light up the Bridgestones and it will become very lively indeed. Like the smaller, lighter, more wieldy McLaren F1 that nicked its ‘world’s fastest’ crown, the XJ220 is a fair weather friend and you need to know that before picking a sub-optimal environment in which to discover what it will do. Which, by the way, includes an ability to punch an elegant Keith Helfet-designed hole in the first vertical object you meet having departed the road.

But treat it with the respect it deserves and demands and the big Jag can still be quite wondrous. You can tell it was designed by a team whose day job at the time was creating Group C racing cars. There’s no slack in anything, its responses and the way it communicates through chassis and steering as pure as can be.

It leaves you wishing once again that in the years that followed so much of that driver interaction you can enjoy on any journey had not been sacrificed at the altar of ever greater performance you can enjoy almost never. This is an utterly, brutally analogue road car and, in most ways that matter to me, all the better for it.

Or put it another way: if you look at the qualities usually required by historic cars to be regarded as among the very finest out there (and with seven-figure price tags attached as a result), they’re usually exceptionally rare, beautiful, ground-breaking, fast and with a real and successful competition pedigree.

The XJ220 ticks every box, but unlike its rivals at the time such as the Ferraris F40 and F50, McLaren F1 and Bugatti EB110 GT, the cheapest of which will cost a million or more, prices still begin at around £400,000. I expect some of that is the badge, some the back story. But as a car, the XJ220 need apologise to no-one.