The XJ220 is the most unloved supercar | Thank Frankel it’s Friday

Can it really be that long? I remember testing it as if it were last week. I was the road test editor of Autocar and we’d secured the right to be the first and only publication to not just drive the car, but do the full number, including recording all its performance figures. I can remember how difficult it was to get off the line and that, despite this, it still reached 60mph in 3.6 seconds and 100mph in 7.9 seconds.

Doesn’t sound like much today does it? But then ask yourself how much faster than that the car would have gone with the sticky tyres used today, the seamless-shift flappy paddle transmission, the launch control software, the all-wheel-drive hardware and so on and on and on. Back in 1992 it was a new level, one that would take two years and a handy little device called the McLaren F1 to beat.

Once we’d got the numbers and got it airborne over the infamous jump at the Millbrook test track (if you’ve ever seen Daniel Craig’s Casino Royale, it is where the Aston Martin DBS was flipped into the air breaking the record for the greatest number of rolls by a car on camera) we headed for Wales to take the photographs, and brought a Ferrari 512 TR along for the ride as absolutely the fastest thing we could find by way of comparison.

But it was no comparison at all. The performance leap between the then Ferrari flagship and Jaguar’s first true supercar (bar, I guess, the XJR-15) was so great that if you were in the XJ following the TR you just got held up. If the XJ led it disappeared.

The next morning a nice couple turned up at our static location. He was a long time car enthusiast and politely stood about, not getting in the way, asking a few well informed questions which we were more than happy to answer. But after a while we needed to get up into the mountains to do our action shots, so we made our excuses and left.

But someone must have told them which road we were using because they turned up there too. And having people milling about when you’re trying to drive cars fast on difficult roads with quick turnarounds is a complication too many. By now it was also late and the light getting low. So, not wishing to be rude, we offered them a quick ride up and down the mountain road after which they really would need to leave us alone. They readily accepted, so he got on the Jag with Steve Sutcliffe, while his wife climbed into the Ferrari beside me.

And we thought we’d give them a ride to remember, so let’s just say we deployed the available machinery to the full, reaching speeds I have no intention of owning up to nearly three decades later.

They couldn’t have been happier and said their farewells full of gratitude, wreathed in smiles and having had an experience neither would likely ever forget.

And as he was leaving the man said, ‘I’ve got go anyway, or I’ll be late for work’. Late for work? It must already have been 20:00.

‘Really?’ one of our number replied, ‘What do you do for a living?’

‘I’m in the traffic police, working nights. Cheerio.’

And with that he was gone.

As for the XJ220, it was a profoundly flawed machine, but it was a game-changer and is today an incredibly rare machine. You’ll see about four Ferrari F40s for every XJ220. So I’m glad the market is starting to recognise their contribution the history of the supercar not least even today and on the right road, it is still devastating to drive.

Images courtesy of Bonhams.