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Man Maths: Jaguar XE SV Project 8
2 weeks ago
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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