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Man Maths: Jaguar XE SV Project 8

1 month ago

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Writer:

Dan Prosser | Ti co-founder

Date:

2 November 2024

If a 911 GT3 and a humdrum Jaguar saloon somehow had children, they’d probably look a lot like this. The XE SV Project 8 was many things – the most powerful Jaguar road car ever, the fastest four-door on the Nürburgring, a saloon car unlike any other and almost certainly one of the slowest selling Jaguars of all time.

Jaguar planned to shift 300 – not exactly a production run to make Toyota quake with fear – but even that proved ambitious. The company has never said exactly how many Project 8s were built in the end, but people in the know put it around the 250 mark. This British car that would appeal most strongly to British buyers was only available in left-hand drive, which can’t have done its prospects much good.

But those who did buy them swear by their Project 8s. They love the 592bhp supercharged V8 and the four-wheel drive system that does such a fine job of deploying it. They adore its puffed up looks, the rousing soundtrack, its rarity and the mighty performance. And presumably they like that it’s not just another German supersaloon – this is very much the iconoclast’s performance four-door.

A Nürburgring lap time of 7min 23sec made it king of the saloons

You could have a huge rear wing and a two-seat configuration with a whacking great bar in the back for harnesses and buckets in the front, or four seats and no wing, just a discreet ‘Touring’ spoiler. It was developed and built by Jaguar Land Rover’s Special Vehicle Operations team, essentially a bunch of engineers and designers posted some distance away from the mothership and told to fill their boots. This car’s immediate predecessor was the hotrod F-Type Project 7, the most extreme version of the F-Type that doffed its very fiddly canvas cap towards the Le Mans-winning D-Type.

You only need to glimpse a Project 8 as it thunders by to realise it’s no ordinary XE. The tracks and arches are far wider (the rear track was stretched by 73mm, the front by 24mm), the ride height much lower to the ground. The cutouts in the rear arches that reveal a slice of Michelin rubber are almost pornographic. This, said Jaguar, was a genuine 200mph car. The 400mm carbon ceramic discs and six-piston calipers on the front axle made sure the Project 8 stopped as hard as it went.

When I first drove one at Portimão circuit in May 2018, I was stunned by how quick and capable it was. It ripped around that track harder and faster than any four-door saloon I’ve ever driven. There’s a right-hander halfway around the lap that you attack in fourth gear. Through there, the Project 8 adopted this wonderfully neutral attitude, sliding ever so slightly through the apex under power. It did all that without being horribly compromised for road driving.

Maybe the £149,995 asking price was another reason the Project 8 didn’t sell out. Today they are few and far between in the classifieds, but I saw one listed for £114,950 and another for 50 quid less than £100,000. So they’ve come down a fair bit since 2018, but they’re not exactly cheap – you could get a 911 GT3 and a humdrum Jaguar saloon for that…

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