HISTORY
Supercharging reinvigorated Jaguar, and made its first appearance 30 years ago on the X300 XJR. This is the story of Jaguar’s path to forced induction
FORD’S TAKEOVER of Jaguar at the start of the 1990s brought fresh challenges for the American giant, not least the need to expand the Coventry-built line-up in order to widen its appeal and achieve increased sales. Existing plans to replace the XJ40 with a new saloon codenamed XJ90, and to launch the XJ41 GT project, were ultimately scuppered by Ford’s money men. A year-on-year fall in Jaguar sales for 1990 exacerbated the fact that the company was haemorrhaging money it could scarcely afford to lose, although elements of both scrapped projects were to resurface in the car that later helped to the transform the image of Jaguar’s saloon range: the X300-generation XJR.
Through exclusive interviews with two of the leading lights behind the project, we can tell the full story of the development of the supercharged Jaguar XJR project, from conception to production. Martin Joyce led development of the initial prototype, while Andy Stodart was part of the small team readying the supercharged engine for a production installation.
Jaguar had initially been working with forced induction as part of the XJ41 programme, which was to receive a twinturbocharged variant of the AJ6 engine as its halo model. These cars were effectively the first ‘F-Type’ project to be taken seriously, as a sporting stablemate for the XJ-S, and had begun in 1980. Jaguar had plans to conquer the American market, and the XJ41 was to form the backbone of these, along with the XJ40 saloon. Jaguar’s aim was to offer a range comprising the XJ40, XJ41 (and XJ42 roadster), and XJ-S – a trio that America would hopefully take to with vigour.
Delays with the XJ40 ultimately meant a delay with XJ41 development, during which time new rivals came along offering far more power than the AJ6 could muster. The 4.0-litre variant was adopted, and work carried out to twin-turbocharge it. The improvements to the normally-aspirated (NA) engine in parallel to this formed one of the first projects for development engineer Martin Joyce, who had joined Jaguar straight from university in 1984 and remained with the company until 2003: “I’ve woven the XJ41 into the story for two reasons – it does have an impact, but it’s also my baby. I worked on the NA engine for the ’41; the turbo engine was handled by another engineer. The two engines were developed in parallel, some systems led by the turbo project, some by the NA project, depending on the importance of the system for each version.” Ford’s bean counters killed off the project in 1990, when slides in the development schedule meant it wasn’t due to launch until ’95. It was feared that by then, XJ4
