Feral Cat

IT’S JAG’S MOST POWERFUL LIMO EVER, BUTTHE XJR575 MARKS A TURNING POINT IN THEXJ’S 50-YEAR HISTORY.

- Scott Newman

SHE’S THE LAST OF the V8s... it’s the duck’s guts... 600 horsepower through the wheels.”

Forty years ago, the roads west of Melbourne rumbled to the sound of a Cleveland 351ci V8 as George Miller completed filming Mad Max. Its plot examined issues of violence, grief and revenge, but it’s best remembered as a celebration of horsepower, primarily thanks to the screaming, supercharged, nitro-fuelled Pursuit Special driven by Mel Gibson in his role as Max Rockatansky.

Melbourne’s urban sprawl is expanding rapidly, but the roads and scenery between Little River in the south, Bacchus Marsh in the north and Meredith in the west have changed little since 1978. Ruler-straight B-roads disappear into a heat-hazed horizon, intersecting the vast, straw-coloured fields that gave Mad Max its semi-apocalyptic vibe.

It might seem an odd place to test the Jaguar XJR575, but Coventry’s latest supercharged V8 limo is almost certainly its last. Jaguar head of design, Ian Callum, is on record as stating the new XJ, expected to appear in early 2019, will be bigger, roomier, filled with cutting-edge tech and look radically different to the traditional limousine. It’s also expected to be powered purely by electricity, using technology transfer from the i-Pace crossover. The XJR575, then, is the last of the V8s.

The XJ’s flagship status makes it the sensible choice to, i-Pace aside, lead Jaguar’s electrically powered charge. After all, the X350 XJ (2003-2009) was Jaguar’s first all-aluminium car and the current X351 a stylistic game changer, taking the ‘new Jaguar’ look debuted by the XF and developing it with a large, square grille and vertical tail-lights, intended to mimic a cat’s claws. In design terms, it was like replacing the Queen Mary with the Starship Enterprise.