Modern regulations make it hard to develop a brand new car with an old-school mentality, but that doesn’t mean we can’t take the things we know and drastically improve them. Starting with the controversial Jaguar XJS coupe, two years of hard work have culminated in this, the TWR Supercat. It’s a fully worked-over rocket for the road, and it should enter customer hands sooner than you might expect.
TWR, which stands for Tom Walkinshaw Racing, was an absolute motorsports legend. Although the firm started out racing Mazda RX-7s and took on a variety of work from the Nissan R390 to the Holden VN Commodore SS Group A SV race car, it’s linked most strongly with Jaguar. From Jaguar XJS touring cars to the wild XJR-9 Group C car to having a hand in the Jaguar XJ220, TWR built some legendary cats. However, after Ford bought Jaguar in 1994, things went a bit sideways. TWR diversified, but it wasn’t sustainable for good, and the firm folded in 2002. However, TWR is now back, with Tom’s son Fergus running the show.
To style the Supercat, TWR tapped Khyzyl Saleem, the same guy who designed Travis Pastrana’s Airslayer gymkhana Subaru wagon, the modified Polestar 1 cover car from “Need For Speed: Heat“, and body kits for multiple SEMA cars, as lead designer. The firm also brought on Magnus Walker as a consultant, famed for his litany of Outlaw Porsches. The result is a seriously aggressive carbon fiber body that underwent extensive computational fluid dynamics testing before the first molds were made to ensure baseline aerodynamic efficacy. The result looks like a touring car for the road.
From seriously pumped fenders to side-exit exhausts, the TWR Supercat looks the absolute business. Up front, you’ll find a partially shaved nose, a bulging, vented hood, and an air dam deeper than Lake Superior. Out back, you’ll spot a diffuser large enough to house a family of five, a subtle roof spoiler, and a ducktail that picks up off the flared rear fenders. The Supercat even punches out the Jaguar XJS’ buttressed C-pillars to let air pass clean through them, and rolls on a wicked set of turbofan wheels.
Under the hood sits a V12 that’s been supercharged to north of 600 horsepower, and it’s hitched to a proper manual gearbox. While TWR isn’t going into any further powertrain details yet, that’s enough to know that the Supercat will have some serious shove. Obviously, that much power requires some serious suspension work to harness it, so TWR’s been both in the lab and on the test track taming the beast. The firm claims the Supercat has been through a full regimen of aerodynamic, performance, and durability testing, which supports a relatively short timeline to production.
The first TWR Supercat examples will roll down the line in the fourth quarter of this year, and prices start at £225,000 before taxes, or about $281,820 at current exchange rates. That’s not cheap, but actually, it’s not a bad deal either. When a Singer-modified Porsche costs a million dollars, and a Bentley Continental GT S starts at $277,150, spending that sort of money on a thoroughly reimagined Jaguar is both imaginative and borderline sensible. Plus, with a production run of just 88 cars to honor the TWR Jaguar XJR-9’s 1988 24 Hours of Le Mans victory, you know the Supercat is going to be rare.
Should you wish to see this wild reinterpretation of a Jaguar XJS in person, TWR has announced what it calls “a full dynamic debut in Summer 2024.” I’m not a betting man, but there’s a good chance that may happen at the Goodwood Festival of Speed. Either way, we can’t wait to hear this beast roar.
(Photo credits: TWR)
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Tom’s been dead for 15 years. Who is driving this company now?
The article addressed it in the second paragraph: “However, TWR is now back, with Tom’s son Fergus running the show.”
Reading is fundamental.
I think it looks like an awesome restomod/reimagining of the XJS. Almost like a curvy N Vision 74.
Should have hired Adrian, an actual designer.
Yeah the body design is a bit much, it’s gone way past the tasteful updates that someone like Singer does. I suspect it will still sell but I hope if it does they tame things down for the next one.
It looks ok in an 80’s Retrowave kinda way, but the original loooooooong nose of the XJ-S is obscured now, and it leaves the whole care looking a bit more generic as a result.
I love me some boxy flairs, but this, with that goofy chin-on-the-floor face, just looks like a demented mouth-breather
TWR’s own competition XJ-S was barely more aggressive than stock even with up to 500hp (just a bigger air dam and some beefy tires). Even the Group 44 XJ-S wasn’t this extreme. If they come back with an Excellent Excellentcat or something below the Supercat, it’d be far more appealing.
Sodium hypobromite coating on this thing. I can’t touch it.
It took me several minutes to figure out what’s being said here. I was looking for allergies, reactions, use as a coating, no strong signals on any of those things. If you’re curious too:
The chemical formula can be written as [spoiler title=”spoiler”] NaBrO [/spoiler]
lmfao I’m sorry my (bad) joke didn’t land but this thing is corny. It deserved a joke in proportion.
I wonder how much original XJS is still left there, since I presume they’re doing the Singer approach of using an existing vehicle as the base for the build.
Most people in the US don’t know who Tom Walkinshaw Racing (TWR) was, but they were hugely important to Jaguar in the 80s and 90s. They had some great success taking the already-aging XJ-S to some major racing podium finishes.
And one of the most interesting stories happened later. Jaguar began developing the XJ41/XJ42, which were a coupe and convertible (respectively) meant to replace the XJ-S. These would be called the F-Type. When Ford officially took over Jaguar in 1989/1990, the firm’s quality control and assembly standards were so poor that Ford canceled the XJ41/XJ42. They also canceled the XJ90, a planned successor to the XJ40 that would have been a clean-sheet redesign, instead of the evolved XJ40 they ended up using that became the X300 (1994-1997) XJ.
For the coupe and cabriolet, Ford elected to have Jaguar give the XJ-S a pretty extensive facelift and to drop the hyphen, so that it became XJS. Still, everyone knew that this was only a temporary fix. TWR decided to take the best parts of the stillborn XJ41/XJ42, chiefly its suspension design, and stick them under the existing XJS floorpan. Then, TWR presented this budget-alternative platform idea to the Jaguar board, as an XJS successor. When Jaguar balked, TWR presented it to another Ford property…Aston Martin. Aston Martin picked it up, and it became the basis of the DB7. The DB7 also used, initially, a supercharged Jaguar 3.2-liter I6, causing many to christen it “The Jag in Drag.”
The DB7 gave Jaguar’s board the confidence it needed to use the modified XJS platform on that car’s successor, and the eventual outcome was the X100 XK8, designed to accept the company’s new V8 family, in place of the customary I6 and V12 engines. The X100 XK8 lasted through 2006. So TWR helped Jaguar get quite a bit more life out of a platform that originally began in the 70s.
Someone really wanted that TWR logo to look like it says TVR if you squint.
It’s a Twevor, then?
For all those dukes and viscounts who always wanted a Challenger, but less uncouth?
It just doesn’t give me enough Jag-yew-ah.
TWR Supercat is an anagram for Super Twat RC.
I need way more hilarious anagram comments in my life lol
I love Jags, especially the old XJS, and I’ve always thought of what a cool restomod it would make. I’m down with the V12 and stickshift, turbofan wheels and even the updated LED lighting.
But the bodykit is a bit too Fast & Furious for my taste.
Agreed, love the look of the XJS (my Dad had one when I was a kid). Tone down the fenders and the wing and this has potential.
Jaguar made a lot of beautiful cars. I’ve never felt the XJS as one of them.
It’s not ugly, just not really comparable to the other classic jaguar designs.
That Polestar 1 is one of the best cover cars of the entire NFS series :). That game is great except for the soundtrack and story.
Heat was the last NFS I enjoyed, I can’t bring myself to buy Unbound even when it’s on massive sale, it just looks so gimmicky.
NFS needs to ditch the story and just go for open world, customizable avatars, garages and vehicles. I don’t need a story, car culture is deep enough on its own, I just need an outlet to explore it all virtually.
I dig….but I feel it needs to tighten the skirt-line and lose (or tone down, the front splitter. Throws off the proportions too much for my taste.
Nah
That’s a good cat
Well that styling is certainly an…..interesting choice for something inspired by the generally clean lines of a Jaguar.
Those headlights make it look like an XJS that’s been out all night on a cocaine bender. Which is probably in character, really.
The XJ-S never had particularly clean lines. The lines got cleaner when it was heavily facelifted (and rechristened XJS), circa 1990/1991…but it’s a bit of a sore spot for Jaguar snobs.