For sale: the Jaguar C-X75 stunt car from James Bond's Spectre
Jaguar designed it, Williams engineered it, James Bond was chased by it… and the world wanted it. What else but the extraordinarily fine-looking Jaguar C-X75 from the 2015 007 movie Spectre. Now the Jag we were told we couldn’t have, you can now have. It’s up for auction on 30th November with a guide price of around a million dollars.
The C-X75 began life as a joint project between Jaguar and Williams Advanced Engineering and reprised the voluptuous mid-engined Jag in spectacular style. At its debut in 2010 the concept wowed the Paris Motor Show for its two-seater sports looks and advanced technology that ran to a turbine-powered electric hybrid drivetrain with 780bhp. Jaguar looked into the feasibility of making a run of 250 cars.
In the event no more than a handful of prototypes were made, followed by another handful of stunt cars that looked the same but were built around a rally-style spaceframe with 492bhp V8 amidships.
It was in this form – as driven by the evil hitman Mr Hinx around the streets of Rome and eventually into the River Tiber – that the C-X75 eventually found fame, arguably more than it would otherwise have enjoyed. Chasing Daniel Craig’s James Bond in his Aston Martin DB10 in Spectre ranks as one of the better Bond car chases.
The car RM Sotheby’s will be auctioning at the Yas Marina Circuit during the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix on 30th November is chassis 001, the first of the cars built in 2015 specially for filming. It was also the car used for promotional work ahead of the Mexican Grand Prix that year, doing laps with Williams-Martini race ace Felipe Massa behind the wheel.
RM Sotheby’s has put a guide price of $800-1.2 million on the beautiful Jag, as a “piece of modern film history”. It is drivable, and will be checked over by Williams prior to its sale, but note that, like Felipe, you will only be able to indulge fantasies of chasing James Bond on a track. The car is not road registered.
For Will Smith, RM’s car specialist, the C-X75 car chase was one of the most intense and technologically advanced chase scenes in a Bond film to date. “But it is also a production Jaguar that never was, and built in partnership with Williams F1 no less. Bond has long been synonymous with some of the world’s most incredible cars, and that’s exactly what we have in the Jaguar C-X75.”
Images courtesy of R.M. Sotheby’s.