The all-carbonfibre Jaguar XJR-15 was Tom Walkinshaw’s vision of what the XJ220 should have been. James Elliotthas a rare drive of a pioneering British hypercar
Photography Simon Kay
Fen End may have its own banked section but, this 100m mini-Karussell aside, it is not exactly the Nürburgring. In fact, having been built on the old Honiley Airfield site near Wroxall only five years ago, in circuit longevity terms the tarmac on JLR’s test track in the Midlands is barely dry. That said, you can still see the shape of the WW2 airfield in the track, about half of it directly overwriting what was there, half underlining the remainder like shadow text.
The former Prodive site crams a lot into a small space, offering one long (almost mile-long) straight, a shorter one that sweeps left before a 180º loop onto the short top section and into a standard right, which propels you back onto another long, undulating straight. Those two long stretches are connected by that sharp slingshot bank… or a flat, ground-level option for those with either less velocity or smaller cojones. Three lanes wide, but flanked on both sides with Armco and no run-off, the Fen End track doesn’t offer a massive amount in terms of gradient change, but on my first visit I find that the home of JLR’s SVO (Special Vehicle Operations) is more than enough to properly test a car. Even a proper monster like the JaguarSport XJR-15.
A lot has been written about the XJR-15 – indeed, the model’s history was excellently and comprehensively covered by James Page in Octane 197 following the astonishing 2018 Goodwood gathering of 11 cars, owners, and notables from the XJR-15 project – but the most succinctly pertinent description I ever heard was when owner Valentine Lindsay enthused: ‘It is the next best thing to a McLaren F1 at a 20th of the price.’* (*Valuation correct at the time of the claim, and more or less still is.) There was a fundamental difference, however: the F1 was a road car that was rather handy on the track; the XJR-15 was a racer that proved to be surprisingly, er, legal on the road.
Constructed of guts, genius and steely, oft-fractious Scot, the project came about when Touring Car and Endurance magician Tom Walkinshaw was left unimpressed by Jaguar’s XJ220 show car and, after the on-track successes of TWR’s Tony Southgate-designed XJR-8 and -9, started working on a road car to exploit the public euphoria. With Peter Stevens enlisted and working on a carbon XJR-8 tub, the team soon realised that a barely modified roadgoing derivative
