TWIN TEST
We compare two V8 performance icons which neatly mixed the old and new
I If some of our British readers are looking at the incongruous pairing on these pages and judging it to be a somewhat tenuous comparison then yes, I can see where you’re coming from. But think laterally enough and the Corvette and XKR have more in common than you might think.
Both were announced as thoroughly modern designs yet retained elements of their predecessor – the pushrod V8 in the case of GM and the XJ-S platform in the case of Jaguar – and over in the USA there would have been more than a few buyers torn between the homegrown brawn of the Vette and the understated restraint of the Jaguar.
Not too many UK buyers probably lost sleep fretting over a ‘Corvette versus XKR’ decision, but for a brief while the two were in fact on sale here together, albeit the GM car only in left-hand drive. Launched in 1997, the C5 generation Corvette was the first to be properly marketed in Europe – including the UK – and lasted until 2004, meaning it neatly overlapped the X100 XKR.
There’s also another fascinating ‘what if?’ element to the comparison, since the two could very easily have ended up being in-house competitors and it’s entirely possible we could have had a Jaguar coupe powered not by the advanced AJ-V8 but by Chevy’s LS motor.
As Sir John Egan recounts in his biography, the Jaguar board was less than enthused by the Ford deal and at one point was pursuing a joint-venture with General Motors via its German Opel subsidiary. Indeed, the Ford deal at one point was deemed by Dearborn executives to be so precarious that a team of FoMoCo executives was even positioned in a Trollhättan hotel, poised to sign up Saab instead if the Jaguar deal failed.
Back to reality though and the Corvette C5 remains a rare beast on British roads, especially in factory-supplied European form, but we managed to track one down at Stone Cold Classics in Kent, where they seem to find well-preserved survivors like this – and if I tell you that it was sharing showroom space with a pristine Fiat Uno Selecta then that tells you all you need to know. So how do the two stack up together 20 years later?
Jaguar XKR
Naturally, as a reader of JW you won’t need chapter and verse on the history of the X100 XKR. Suffice to say that this was a car which was eagerly awaited, the rumours of an ‘F type’ having appeared regularly in the press for years.
Jaguar had been working on a replacement for the XJ-S for a very long time and among the several false starts was the adventurous XJ41, essentially a coupe derivative of the XJ40 wit
