Jaguar XJR-15: Thirty-Five Years of Magnificent Madness

You know, some cars are built to take kids to school. Others are made to ferry accountants from Swindon to Reading and back again, all while sipping diesel and making Greta Thunberg feel a little less grumpy. And then, ladies and gentlemen, there are cars like the Jaguar XJR-15 — cars built purely because someone, somewhere, was delightfully mad.

Picture the scene. It’s the late 1980s. The suits at Jaguar have just won Le Mans and decided the best way to celebrate wasn’t with champagne, but by giving a racing car licence plates. And just like that, the Jaguar XJR-15 was born, a vehicle so utterly bonkers, it made the Bugatti EB110 look like a sensible family hatchback.

Now, the XJR-15 wasn’t just a road-going racer. Oh no. It was a full-blooded Le Mans prototype cunningly disguised as something your wealthy uncle might take to Waitrose for a bottle of Pouilly-Fumé. Designed by Peter Stevens, who later sculpted the McLaren F1, the XJR-15 looked like a futuristic spaceship that had accidentally crashed into a wind tunnel. It was low. It was wide. And it had all the subtlety of Brian Blessed in a library.

Power came from a 6.0-litre V12 engine that sounded like a Spitfire having a fistfight with a chainsaw. This engine, plucked straight from Jaguar’s racing stable, produced 450bhp — and remember, this was the early ’90s. Back then, 450bhp was enough to make a Ferrari Testarossa quake in its Italian leather loafers. And it weighed just 1,050kg. To put that into perspective, if a modern Range Rover weighs approximately the same as Jupiter, the XJR-15, by comparison, is lighter than one of Kate Moss’ shoes.

The interior, meanwhile, was a joyous combination of racecar minimalism and utter madness. Getting inside required the flexibility of an Olympic gymnast and the patience of a saint. There were no creature comforts. The dashboard was less informative than a North Korean tourist brochure. And the seats? They made church pews feel positively indulgent. But nobody cared. Because once you pressed the loud pedal, everything else ceased to matter.

Performance? Well, it could hit 60mph in just 3.9 seconds and keep accelerating until your face resembled the back end of a Shar Pei dog. Top speed? A cool 191 mph. This wasn’t just fast for its time. It was borderline witchcraft.

The XJR-15 was famously developed by Tom Walkinshaw Racing (TWR), a man who viewed ‘health and safety’ with about as much enthusiasm as a vegetarian at a steakhouse. Underneath the carbon fibre skin was a chassis based heavily on the XJR-9 Group C racer, a car designed specifically for destroying race circuits. In short, the XJR-15 had about as much in common with a road car as Boris Johnson does with sensible haircuts.

Here’s an interesting fact most people don’t know. When the XJR-15 launched, buyers didn’t simply pick up their keys from a shiny showroom. No, Jaguar made buyers race their brand-new cars in a one-make championship series before they could take them home. Imagine buying a new toaster and Currys insisting you first make breakfast for Gordon Ramsay — absolutely barking.

In total, just 53 examples of the XJR-15 were made, each costing around £500,000 at launch. Adjusted for inflation, that’s roughly equivalent to the GDP of Belgium. Owners included people with far too much money and, apparently, not enough survival instinct. But, oh, how glorious it must have been to own one.

Quirky features? Plenty. The doors, for instance, didn’t open conventionally. They swung upwards, like a bird startled by a fox. And the windscreen was steeply raked to a degree that meant visibility was about as good as looking through a bathroom window smeared with Vaseline. Reversing? Forget it. Easier to sell your house and move forward again.

One of the best-known quirks was its noise. It wasn’t just loud; it was thunderous. Passengers described conversations inside the cabin as akin to holding polite chit-chat during a heavy artillery barrage. Noise-cancelling headphones? They’d have melted.

Even the tyres had a story. Designed specifically for the XJR-15, they cost more than a fortnight in the Maldives and lasted roughly as long as a Kardashian marriage.

Interestingly, the XJR-15 shared more than just DNA with its cousin, the XJ220. Both were Jaguar’s efforts to produce ultimate supercars, with the XJR-15’s development directly influencing the later, more refined XJ220. Think of the XJR-15 as the loud, rebellious older sibling, and the XJ220 as the younger one who went to finishing school.

Speaking of special, at our Secret Meet in 2024, we had the utterly astonishing sight of 12 XJR-15s gathered together — a spectacle about as common as unicorn spotting in Wolverhampton.

This year marks the 35th anniversary of the XJR-15. Thirty-five years since Jaguar took leave of its senses and created something magnificent. Today, the Jaguar XJR-15 has reached mythical status among car collectors. Prices regularly sail beyond £1 million, and spotting one on the road is about as likely as seeing Elvis at your local Tesco. But those lucky enough to own one hold the keys not just to a car, but to a slice of automotive lunacy the likes of which we’ll never see again.

Because, in truth, the XJR-15 represented the peak of automotive excess. A time when engineers dreamed big, accountants weren’t invited to meetings, and common sense took a well-deserved sabbatical. The Jaguar XJR-15. Mad as a box of frogs. Utterly impractical. And absolutely, completely, brilliantly wonderful. 

Written by: Paul Pearce