By Chris Russon on 2017-11-29 - The driving force behind Eurekar. Chris heads up a team of motoring correspondents under the Driving Force banner. Prior to Driving Force becoming independent in 2010 he was Chief Motoring Editor for Trinity Mirror Regional newspapers. Chris has been writing about cars for almost 40 years.
THE Jaguar XE is the quickest four-door production car in the world after completing a record breaking lap of the legendary Nurburgring Nordschleife circuit in Germany faster than a Ferrari.
A production-ready prototype of the high performance XE SV Project 8 set a new fastest lap time for a saloon car of seven minutes 21.23 seconds, smashing the previous record around the 12.9-mile track by almost 11 seconds.
With 50-year-old Belgian racing driver Vincent Radermecker at the wheel, the 600ps Jaguar hit speeds of 180mph, averaging an incredible 105.25mph.
That's quicker than the time set by a Ferrari 488 GTB and beat the previous record for a saloon of seven minutes 23 seconds, achieved by an Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio in September last year.
The XE SV Project 8 is the most extreme road-legal Jaguar to date and has been developed by Jaguar Land Rover's Special Vehicle Operations team based in Coventry.
The car is hand-built at the SVO workshops and is powered by a 5.0-litre V8 engine tuned to give it a 0 to 60 acceleration of just 3.3 seconds with a top speed of 200mph.
Production will be limited to 300 units and the car is priced from £149,995.
Mark Stanton, director of SVO, said: "The SVO design and engineering team's mission was to create the most track-focused road-legal Jaguar in history - not only the fastest, but also the most agile. As a result, only the roof and front door skins of Project 8's body are carried-over unaltered from XE and 75 per cent of its mechanical hardware is new.
"This astonishing Nurburgring Nordschleife record validates the success of such extensive changes."
And John Edwards, Jaguar Land Rover Special Operations managing director, added: "SVO exists to push the boundaries of performance, luxury and all-terrain capability. The hand-assembled XE SV Project 8 takes that principle to the limit, extracting supercar-beating performance from Jaguar's most compact four-door sedan.
"The Nurburgring Nordschleife record underlines our commitment to deliver the most extreme Jaguar ever to Project 8 clients."