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We encounter a fascinating XJR which represents what the original designers could have achieved if given a free reign
I FOUND an old car magazine in the loft recently and as so often happens, I lost a good half an hour immersed in its contents... something which was all the more surprising, since it was my own picture on the editor’s page and at some point I would have read all of it at least twice.
It’s for that reason that I don’t normally read through every new issue of JW and I fell to wondering if the same is true of engineers working in new model development for major car makers. In many cases, they’ll spend years of their lives working on a car, yet when it reaches production they move on to the next one without a backwards glance.
Or do they? As we discovered when we met Andy Stodart, owner of the XJR you see here, some projects leave a lasting impression long after they’ve ceased to become a part of the daily grind.
It took a while though: starting as a student engineer at Jaguar, he was some way off the bottom of the ladder for company cars and so didn’t acquire his own XJR until 2003.
By then though, he’d covered more miles in the X300 than many long-term owners had driven in these cars, beginning with the early prototypes which were essentially XJ40s fitted with the AJ16 engine and progressing to extreme climate testing in Canada and Arizona.
Despite its significant place in Jaguar history, the Browns Lane top brass had been initially hesitant to sanction development of a supercharged XJ and Andy joined the XJR project shortly after it was given the green light for production – the expectation being that it would sell only 200 or so units as a niche product instead of the 6547 it eventually clocked up.
Andy’s speciality at the time was engine control electronics and he came to the XJR project fresh from developing a knock control system for the V12 engine plus a similar system for the ill-fated XJ41 ‘F-Type’ which was essentially that used for the supercharged AJ16.
The engine management electronics controlling the fuel injection and ignition were supplied by Lucas and it was the job of Andy and his colleagues as calibration engineers to refine the control ‘map’ within the ECU governing fuelling and ignition for production.
These days there are countless remapping specialists who can promise to transform your car in just half an hour with a laptop and – if you’re lucky –a rolling road or even some on-road testing. In the world of production cars though, the process is more involved and begins with a
