Jaguar XE SV Project 8 Q&A Video
Jaguar pays us a visit to show us their shiny new 200 MPH toy.
In case you missed it, last week Internet Brands’ own Manuel Carrillo II was privileged to participate in a Q&A session with Dan Connell and Dave Foster from Jaguar about the new and exciting Jaguar XE SV Project 8.
Dan Connell is head of Global PR for Jaguar Land Rover’s SVO (Special Vehicle Operations) department, while Dave was the lead engineer on the project. They were kind enough to let us crawl all over one of the two Project 8s in existence, and then humored our questions afterward.
They were remarkably good sports and we really appreciated the opportunity. The full write-up is on JaguarForums, one of our sister sites.
While the Project 8 isn’t road legal just yet, we’re excited for what the future holds. Looking more like a touring car racer than a street car, all of the fancy aerodynamic trickery required to get the Project 8 to 200 MPH is impressive indeed. Even with almost 600 horsepower on tap, it still takes a lot of work to push a sedan through the air that quickly.
In addition to keeping the car planted while simultaneously making it as slippery as possible, another concern was cooling. If you think that these three goals sound like they run counter-productive to each other, you’d be absolutely right. It took a ton of work to balance those concerns and make the XE SV Project 8 a success. Every surface of the car was optimized to improve airflow from front to rear. In short, it’s an aerodynamic masterpiece, in a class by itself among performance sedans.
While all of the newer Jaguars sound phenomenal – we’d argue that the sound is the best part of owning one – the Project 8, with 592 snarling, rampaging horses under the hood, might be the best sounding Jaguar ever.
