Hero Cars: Jaguar XJ220

[TZ04XJR]

A decent review of the XJ220. I can remember the first time I saw one in person at the Imperial Palace Car Museum in Vegas. What a beautiful machine..

Woooooow @ 3:47

[Sticky]

Not sure if you have seen them with the infiniti headlight upgrade, makes it look much better:

[Sorena]

The XJ220 is a truly magnificent piece of car history. It was built in collaboration with Tom Walkinshaw, a genius who doesn't get enough credit for his works. There is a cool story about this man and his racing team.

In early 90's the guy received a request from Porsche stating that they want a race car for Le Mans but they don't want to spend much money. So Tom Walkinshaw and his team made a car from leftover parts. The chassis was an old Jaguar chassis, the running gear was from Porsche 956 from early 80's. But in 1995 when the cars were just about to hit the tarmac, the regulations changed and that was enough for Porsche to pull the plug on the project and instead they focused on developing the GT1.

In '96 a chap called Joest convinced Porsche to give him the never-tracked prototypes because Porsche thought the cars would never do good. Joest and TWR made a slight changes on the prototypes to meet the new regulations. Soon it was ready to race and entered Le Mans, just like the new Porsche GT1. And surprisingly enough, the car kicked GT1's ass all the way from the start line to the finish line with claiming the overall victory in '96 and '97.

Porsche amazed by the performance on those cars went behind TWR's back and took over the whole project and developed the car in-house but the result was a car that wasn't fast enough to keep up with BMW's and Nissans(which were developed by TWR as well).

[LZH]

I actually saw one toady and it reminded me of those great "Crashmasters" early Speedvision series they did....$#@! I gotta find some youtube vids cause they literally put these things on small ovals with infields and called it road racing and they all eventually crashed into eachother.