2010 Jaguar XFR – Road Test « New and Used Car Listings

2010 Jaguar XFR – Road Test

Appearances can be deceiving. Jaguars are for old geezers, aren’t they? And they definitely shouldn’t be spending time on a dirt oval, that most down-home of American automotive playgrounds, should they? But the new XFR most certainly isn’t for the AARP set, and all that it offers can’t be exploited fully on a paved public road.

On the surface, it’s elegant and refined. Yet it also has 510 horsepower capable of tearing the tail loose at a twitch of the stability-control button. It’s a lugubrious Jamaican fast bowler who’s your best friend until he takes to the field and tries to knock your head off.

To test our theory that the XFR is really an old-style muscle car at heart, we decided to take it to Butler Motor Speedway, a three-eighths-mile drifting nirvana near Quincy, Michigan. As a playground for large, overpowered V-8 stock cars, it’s the perfect place—no cops, only one concrete wall to hit—to wring out another overpowered V-8 sedan.

Now, it might seem that taking this $80,000 sports sedan to an oval in the wilds of Michigan isn’t exactly cricket, but then, that game is deceiving, too. To the outsider, cricket is a screwy English game with impenetrable rules, played in bucolic settings by persons dressed in white street clothing. Between jack-rabbit bursts of activity, there’s no action aside from the eating of crustless cucumber sandwiches and the sipping of tea.

But under this veneer of gentility, cricket is a vicious game in which bowlers (they’re called pitchers in baseball) try to maim batsmen with 5.5-ounce balls made of compressed leather and cork and wool that are hurled at up to 90 mph. It’s also a game in which “sledging” is an art form. (Example: A bowler yells at a batsman: “Why are you so fat?” Retort: “Because every time I make love to your wife, she gives me a biscuit.”) And the spectators on the sidelines who are clapping and providing vocal footnotes (but not too loudly) such as “Good show!”—well, they’re drunk. Why else would they turn out for days on end, except as an excuse to go boozing?

We were already partial to the XF, which won a spot on Car and Driver’s 10Best list for 2009. Thus the R model of this Jaguar, which has more power, more brake, and more grip, is an appealing concept. To turn it into a competitor for unhinged sedans such as the Cadillac CTS-V, Mercedes-Benz E63 AMG, and BMW M5, Jaguar started with the engine. Although the 5.0-liter supercharged V-8 shares the same AJ V-8 nomenclature as the 4.2-liter engine that carries over in the base XF, the only components that are shared are the valve tappets and the head bolts. The new block is made of high-pressure die-cast aluminum and is 0.9 inch shorter than that of the old 4.2 because the oil pump is now located inside the engine rather than mounted externally.

Like the old V-8, it has aluminum heads and four valves per cylinder. The new supercharger is an Eaton TVS (Twin Vortices Series) Roots-type unit that feeds through twin intercoolers and runs a maximum of 11.6 pounds of boost. The engine’s most significant new technology is the use of direct fuel injection, which allows the compression ratio to jump from 9.1:1 to 9.5:1. The numbers this engine produces are big: 510 horsepower at 6000 rpm and 461 pound-feet of torque at 2500 rpm.

Perhaps the most important driveline change is an electronically controlled differential that uses an electric motor and a ball-ramp assembly acting on a multiplate clutch pack. To best deliver the power to the ground, the diff can be varied from fully open to locked, depending on a variety of parameters.The chassis gets a raft of changes. Jag claims the spring rates are stiffer by 30 percent and the anti-roll bars by about 25 percent. The R gets a steering rack that’s about 10 percent quicker than the stock car’s, plus Bilstein continuously variable shocks. They progressively alter damping according to vertical movement, pitch, and roll rate. There’s also a dynamic mode that further stiffens the damping and holds the transmission in gear, even at redline, when shifting manually.Continued…