Jaguar C-X75 – The Big Cat They Couldn’t Tame (Part 2)

Behind the wheel

Simon Newton was once an Autocar work experience lad, many moons ago, when Sutcliffe, Harris and Weaver manned the road test desk. All I can think , as he deftly tidies up ever-more lurid angles of over steer around Gaydon’s twisty and wet – handling circuit, is that if he was as handy then as he is now, he must represent one of the most significant recruitment fails we’ve ever had.

Newton is head of driving dynamics for Williams Advanced Engineering and reported directly to Jaguar’s Mike Cross on the C-X75 project. The track is sodden and the car is in battery mode, but Newton isn’t messing about. He’s clearly not worried about tricky limit handling and wastes few opportunities to flick the car into gentle 40mph slides and that’s with plenty of trees, posts and bits of street furniture to hit. Each time, he collects the car up gracefully, instinctively, without moving his hands from the quarter to three position. He’s making this 850bhp prototype look like a Porsche Cayman, but then chassis engineers have a habit of doing that.

Lighting is also a key element in the design of the C-X75’s cabin

 “We went to a lot of trouble to give the car Jaguar feel,” he says. And you know what he means. This car does skids. “The normal power split in EV mode is 0 per cent biased to the rear wheels, and we limit power at the front wheels when cornering because it tends to bring on under steer. We’ve also worked out a few tricks with the E-diff to add some throttle steer, and, when it’s on, the ESP functions similarly to McLaren’s ‘brake steer’ to keep the nose ticked in on corner entry.”

In electric mode, the performance level feels strong. Instant, torque-dominated, a bit like a turbo hot hatch but entirely without lag. I can’t tell you what the electric motors sound like, though, because they’re being drowned out by the C-X75’s sound synthesizer, which fills the cabin with an electronic noise somewhere between whistle and whine. It’s not unpleasant, and maybe it does make the electric mode feel that bit more dramatic, but you’d never mistake it for ‘real’ noise.

In electric mode, the performance level feels strong

After Newton’s demo, we head to Gaydon’s high-speed circuit: a kinked oval with fourth-gear corners at either end and straights of about a mile in between. The rain is still falling as we swap seats. Better, probably, for me to get a feel for the car’s straight-line performance than try to learn much around the bends, regardless of how benign our man has been making it look.

We engage full-fat hybrid mode and move off, and that in-line four announces itself. It’s all chattering gear-driven cams and ill-tempered low-rev grumble to begin with, but the accelerator pedal seems tamely progressive.

Might as well flatten it, then. We’re in third gear. At 3500rpm you can hear the barp of exhausts; at 6500rpm the engine is fully awake. By 8000rpm it hits a show-stopping stride, at which point you’ll forget all about the electric motors, carbon fiber and engineering genius and get totally caught up in a sense of pure mechanical interaction. Perhaps this Jaguar is an old-school supercar after all. It certainly has the capacity to feel like one.

Sitting inside the C-X75 really is a very special experience.

Ease off, take a breath; repeat and reflect. After several full-power blasts, a picture emerges. Even in the rain, the C-X75 feels every bit as fast as they say it is – up to a point. Up to about 120mph, to be precise, to the top of fourth gear, until which point it could probably run with a Veyron.

But beyond 150mph, the C-X75 doesn’t surge onwards with quite the same urgency. It’s effortlessly fast, but it doesn’t keep going like the very fastest in the world. All I can put it down to is that electric motors still don’t seem to give their best at big speeds, and that 502bhp isn’t quite enough – however spectacularly it’s made to make up the shortfall.

We slow down, peel off and return the car to its charging station for the next lucky non-customer. And I’m left with the impression that, actually, this project has ended up exactly where it should be. Would hyper car owners understand that, to appreciate there’s new $1,5 million car, they have to stand back and see the bigger picture? That it may not quite be the ultimate machine in the most vivid sense, but that there’s more to it than sheer speed? How many Veyron owners know how much CO₂ their car emits? Don’t they just want the fastest car in the world? Could that be why Porsche has still got work to do to sell its remaining 918 Spyders?

Jaguar C-X75 back

Maybe. In order to create the hyper car that does it all, maybe Jaguar had to take the customer out of the equation. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing after all. But speaking, from here on out, as a member of the C-X75 club, maybe I shouldn’t be allowed to comment.