New car news

15 January 2009 - 10:00

Jag at 362km/h

See more pics of the XFR

Meet the fastest Jag in the history of Jags – the XFR. Yep, the car you could have on your driveway later this year is a car that’ll do 362km/h. You read that right: 362km/h.

That’s what it did in the hands of Paul Gentilozzi at Bonneville last year, in a secret attack on the famous salt flats. Slipping under the media radar, Jag gave the car to Gentilozzi and his Rocketsports firm (who have won several Trans-Am and a Daytona 24-hour titles in a racing XKR), and said “go play”.

Which is exactly what they did. Taking a production XFR and only tweaking it slightly – fitting a dirty great wing, remapping the ECU and removing the catalytic converters to push power to 447kW – Gentilozzi and his team took just nine runs to achieve the speed. That was on standard road tyres, too.

Gentilozzi was keen to break that, and despite Bonneville being flooded in places, he carved out a course (albeit a slightly curvy one to avoid the standing water) and went for it.

And luckily, they filmed the whole thing...