Paul Jeffrey
Premium
Like Jaguars? Well you are in luck as Project CARS 2 has plenty of iconic models from the once great British manufacturer for you to enjoy...
We know Project CARS 2 looks set to field upwards of 170 cars come launch day, we know the graphics are going to be awesome, we know Slightly Mad Studios have gone to town on multiplayer and broadcasting functionality and we have been assured that much work under the hood as taken place to improve the experience both on and off track over the original game, so what is left to say about a title still several months away from official release? We that's easy, announce some awesome cars from a manufacturer renowned the world over for producing simply sublime road and race going machines through the decades.
Enter Jaguar, the British marque founded in 1922 by Sir William Lyons and now under the ownership of Indian multinational automotive manufacturing company Tata Motors. Despite it's Indian paymasters Jaguar remains a quintessentially British concern, running under the British Racing Green colours and still producing machinery that manages the blend of elegance, design and performance both in it's ever growing road car division and its (admittedly somewhat scaled back) racing programmes.
With Project CARS 2 comes the iconic brand for the first time, and already we know of the superb XJ220, XJR and F-Type due to be making an appearance, plus potentially other models from a brand famous for cars such as the incredibly successful 1955, 56 and 57 Le Mans winning D-Type right the way through to it's less successful Formula One team back in the mid 2000's. With this brand, you have plenty of choice when selecting popular cars to add to a racing simulation!
As has become customary in recent months, Slightly Mad Studios have released a few new images from the game showing a selected portion of the content players will be able to get their hands on when a public release is achieved hopefully towards the end of the current year. This time the XJ220 and XJR have a chance to take their turn in the spotlight.
As well as releasing some tantalising images from the at the time fastest car in the world, SMS have accompanied the pictures with a nice little write up on the XJ220, a car who's class still shines through even now over 20 years after it was released to the public. You can read what Slightly Mad Studios had to say of the XJ220 below:
The late ’80s and early ’90s were the glory years for Jaguar, not seen since their domination at Le Mans back in the ‘50s. Powered by their mighty V12, wins and championships were coming thick and fast for a company that had just been denationalized. The Jaguar brand was back. But by mid-way through ’93, and out of both the World Sportscar Championship and the IMSA GTP championship, their fortunes were about to take a hit when their new supercar, the XJ220, was about to prove that building the fastest car in the world doesn’t always lead to commercial success ...
For a short interval in the early-1990s, the fastest production road car in the world was a Jaguar. No other car was capable of matching its 212.3mph (341kmh) top speed, nor able to lap the Nürburgring in a time better than 7:46.36.
Behind the scenes, though, the car was a commercial disappointment. The reasons were numerous; global recession, last-minute changes, and the same one that had hampered TWR’s sportscar program after their Le Mans victories in ’88 and ’90—the twin-turbo V6 that replaced the V12.
To understand how Jaguar went from dominating the world of sportscar racing with their XJR-9 to eventually producing only 275 of what remains, to this day, one of the greatest production cars ever built, means looking in on thirteen men who made up the ‘Saturday Club’.
The Saturday Club
The Jaguar XJ220’s creation-myth is an eccentric one—conceived and built by a group of engineers who would meet informally on Saturday afternoons in order to project their world-beating supercar over drinks and jokes, and who would become known as the ‘Saturday Club’. Thirteen men who shared not only a dream, but also a common concern—that the XJR-10 and 11 series of race cars then thundering in the World Sportscar Championship was anathema to the spirit of Jaguar.
Jim Randle, Jaguar’s Director of Engineering, late one evening in the autumn of ’87, considered Jaguar’s product line that included the full-sized luxury XJ-series and the XJ-S luxury grand tourer, both of which sported the iconic Jaguar V12. For Randle, running a sportscar program with a turbo V6 then employed by the XJR-10 and 11 made no sense. Jaguar didn’t do turbos. More to the point, the V6 twin-turbo in the race program didn’t even belong to Jaguar—it belonged to TWR, a lump they had bought back when Group B had folded and Rover’s rally car had been canned.
That the XJR-10 and 11 had been unable to match the V12-powered XJR-9’s exploits with championship and Le Mans wins was, for Randle, even further confirmation that the future had to remain true to the Jaguar V12.
Randle’s mind was made up; he would design a winning car, in-house, built around Jaguar’s V12—a car he believed would be able to go toe-to-toe against the Ferrari F40 and Porsche 959 in the still-to-be-confirmed FIA Group B rules. Over the festive break in ’87, he produced a cardboard model of a design which was then styled in-house by Keith Helfet. With no actual support from the Jaguar board at that point, Randle assembled a dozen like-minded engineers at Jaguar, and invited them to meet on Saturday afternoons through ’88 to develop a common dream—the fastest car in the world they dubbed the XJ220.
The name was chosen as an amalgamation of XJ (for the Le Mans-winning XJR) and 220 (as in 220mph, the projected top speed of Randle’s dream—a four-wheel drive, four-wheel steering, mid-engined, honeycomb-aluminium-shelled Jaguar with an adjustable wing, and powered, of course, by the V12).
Calling in favors from his many contacts in the motoring world, Randle finally had a concept car ready for the ’88 British International Motor Show. The body was hand-built in aluminium and painted silver. Together with scissor doors, an engine cover that was fully transparent to show the V12, and a promise of 220mph and close to 600hp, the concept was an absolute hit. Jaguar’s board, impressed by the reaction to the concept, committed to create a limited production run of Randle’s Saturday Club supercar.
They took preorders on 1,500 models with £50,000 deposit on a projected final sticker price of around £250,000, and set to work on the supercar that was pegged for a ’92 delivery.
The V12 comes back to haunt the Saturday Club
By mid-’91, Randle’s supercar was in all sorts of trouble. The complexity of the mid-engined four-wheel drive, along with its weight, meant the AWD concept had to be abandoned in favor of RWD-only. The car, meanwhile, despite the aluminium body, remained heavy—a whopping 600kgs heavier than the Ferrari F40. Jaguar became nervous, and their nerves were shot-through when Bridgestone, in testing, expressed their reservations that their tyres—or anyone else’s for that matter—could handle the weight of the car at anything near 220mph.
The only solution? The car had to lose significant weight, and dropping the AWD wasn’t enough. All eyes turned to the V12. Randle’s entire project, based around the V12, was about to unravel. But in reality there was no choice; the car had to be produced, commitments had been made, deposits accepted, and it couldn’t be done with the V12.
TWR were brought in and with them came their Group B rally-derived 3.5-litre V6 twin-turbo that had failed to win Le Mans in the XJR-10, and 11. The engine, though, was a potent monster—TWR had already tuned it to 800hp for its sportscar program.
With the turbo replacing the V12, the XJ220 was finally ready for delivery. On time, but with budget swelled, it was far from the concept car that Jaguar had touted two years before; still, it came in lighter, and it came in even faster than projected. Indeed, it was the fastest production car in the world.
It didn’t matter.
Purists turned their back on the turbo. Of the 1,500 who had put down an initial deposit, only 271 would follow through with a purchase, and the legal teams from both buyers and seller got to work. It didn’t help much, either, that the price had swelled to £470,000. The XJ220 was, for Jaguar, a deep disillusionment. The planned 1,500 production would eventually cease at a slim 275, in 1994.
From disaster comes the sublime
Unloved, decried, and dropped into a market that was in the midst of a global recession and had lost its appetite for supercars, the XJ220 was doomed from the off despite being the fastest car in the world.
Project CARS 2 is due for release on Xbox One, PS4 and Windows PC towards the end of 2017.
Check out our Project CARS 2 sub forum for a place to join together with fellow race fans and discuss the game prior to it's launch around September 2017. Once the game is publically available we will be hosting further sub forums with racing league and club events, downloadable setups, mods and more. Stay tuned for all the action here at RaceDepartment!
Which of the selection of cars revealed so far are you most looking forward to trying in the game? Are you happy to see Jaguar well represented in Project CARS 2? Let us know in the comments section below!
