The Jaguar XJ220 Was the Fastest Broken Promise in Supercar History

In October 1988, visitors to the British Motor Show in Birmingham crowded around a silver wedge on the Jaguar stand and reached for their checkbooks. The car was called the XJ220, and it did not exist. There was no production line, no homologation plan, not even a firm decision inside Jaguar to build it. That didn’t stop roughly 1,500 people from trying to secure one of 350 planned build slots, each backed by a £50,000 deposit (about $80,000 at the time). Four years later the car they received was the fastest production car in the world. Many of them wanted their money back anyway. That contradiction is the whole XJ220 story, and it starts with an engine that never made it under the hood.

A Saturday Club Project Born in Thatcher-Era Britain

The XJ220 wasn’t commissioned. It was smuggled into existence. Jim Randle, Jaguar’s director of engineering, sketched the idea of a mid-engined flagship in late 1984, partly as a response to Porsche’s 959 and partly out of frustration that Jaguar, a company winning sports car races again, had nothing on the road to show for it. Official resources weren’t available, so Randle recruited a dozen or so volunteers who met after hours and on weekends. They called themselves the Saturday Club.