A captivating Jaguar concept? The XJ220 is this way | Thank Frankel it’s Friday

Which just goes to show that these days I am somewhat older than the average automotive commentator. Because not only can I remember the day back in October 1988 when Jaguar unveiled another concept at the British International Motor Show in Birmingham but, as a cub reporter for Autocar fully four months into his new life as a motoring journalist, I was there. And no, in the pre-internet era it wasn’t seen by billions of people within seconds of the wraps being removed, but to anyone who cared about cars, the fact Jaguar had just unveiled what was going to be by some distance the fastest production car in history was the biggest news of the day, week, month and year.

The Keith Helfet styled body was unbelievably sleek and graceful and then we learned there was no less beauty beneath, in the form of 6.2-litre version of Walter Hassan’s V12 motor, complete with the four overhead camshafts and 48 valves that had so often been mooted for that engine but never actually put into production. It was slated to have over 500bhp, a substantial upgrade over even the 478bhp of Ferrari’s still new F40 hypercar. And it had four wheel drive, in a mid-engined car! It was almost unheard of.

The timing was crucial: Thatcher’s bull market was charging, rogue traders were advising investors on the strength of a dart thrown at a board divided into ‘buy’ and ‘sell’ (I’d been a city boy myself) and there was money to burn. Deposits flooded in. The XJ220 was a wild, storming, runaway success, and remained that way right up to the moment it most certainly wasn’t.

The production version of the XJ220 was signed off in June 1992, and on September 16^th that year, forever after known as Black Wednesday, the UK crashed out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, interest rates briefly hit 15 per cent and suddenly a large number of depositors thought that perhaps sinking £400,000 into a mere car – around £860,000 in today’s money – was not the greatest idea after all. So they sought to reverse out of their commitment.

Of course none of them gave the about-turn in the country’s financial fortunes as the reason they wanted out, because that would have held as much legal water as an upside down bucket. So instead they said the car they were being asked to buy was not the one they had been offered to buy. 

Here, it has to be said, they had a point. For the production XJ220 was a very different animal indeed. It was, for a start, far smaller than the enormous concept, its length cut from 5140mm to a still lengthy 4930mm, while its width had been reduced from a vast 2200mm to a more manageable 2000mm. Meanwhile the V12 was out, replaced by a twin turbo V6 powering the rear wheels alone. They tried to argue that this wasn’t even a Jaguar engine though as it was already winning races on both sides of the Atlantic in TWR Jaguar XJR-10 and XJR-11 sports prototypes, that contention was perhaps a little harder to stand up. In fact this twin turbo, 24-valve, quad cam racing V6 had started life as a pushrod V8 designed by General Motors for use by Buick and then made famous by its use in countless Rovers, Range Rovers, TVRs and others.

Rather than refund the deposits, or come to an arrangement behind closed doors, Jaguar took the highly original decision to sue its own customers, because it suspected they had not been acting in good faith when they’d put their money down but had instead done so with the intention of ‘flipping’ the car for a fat profit when it arrived. Now that was no longer possible, they lost interest and sought to reverse out of their obligation.

Whatever the truth, or truths of it, Jaguar duly won its case but rarely in this world have victories been more pyrrhic: just 282 of the mooted 350 cars got built, some sold only after an age and at a substantial discount, and though it still turned out to be the fastest car the world had ever known, its reputation never really recovered. Today you’ll pay around £400,000 for an XJ220, about a quarter of what you need to stump up for the slower and nearly five times more common F40. I bow to no man in my adoration of the F40, it is the greatest road car ever built, but having driven several examples of both I know where the bargain lies – and it’s not with the car in red.