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SCMP Reporter

THE Jaguar XJ220's production car victory in the new Grand Touring class at the Le Mans 24-hour race reflects the success of the classic C-type Jaguars exactly 40 years ago.

  Danish driver John Nielsen took the flag at 4 pm in a Unipart-backed Jaguar XJ220, having shared the driving with Australian David Brabham and Scot David Coulthard.

  But Jaguar was not at Le Mans for sentimental reasons.

  A win in what is probably the toughest race in the world establishes credibility for the XJ220 and justifies the huge price tag of about $5.7 million.

  Jaguar's chairman and chief executive, Nick Scheele, said: ''Winning this closely fought class, in what is undoubtedly the most gruelling test of a car's performance and reliability, is a massive endorsement for the XJ220 and the engineering skills behind it.''   The XJ220 was designed with the race track in mind.

  The quad-cam, 24-valve, 3.5-litre, V6 twin-turbo engine is a development of the 1990 XJR-11 sports car and produces 542 brake horsepower.

  The rear floor pan is shaped to include venturi tunnels, to hold the car down on the road using the air-flow, and the suspension is race-style, with double wishbones machined from solid aluminium, and mounted to the uprights with racing car-like rose joints.

  Without race track success, all this expensive technology would be meaningless and the XJ220 would be just another excessively powerful and environmentally irresponsible super car.

  There is a glut of super cars on the world market, with more massively powerful and expensive sports cars than there are buyers.

   Most of the exotic sports cars were conceived during the boom years of the 1980s, when car manufacturers enjoyed a surge in demand for fast cars.

  A scramble to build the biggest and fastest saw the Bugatti name resurrected to adorn a wedge of Italian styling, pushed by a quad turbo V12.

   The McLaren F1 was born in England and claimed to use the technology of Formula One racing in a car built with no regard for cost.

  Five hundred brake horsepower and a 320 kilometre per hour top speed became almost common place and huge sums of money were exchanged just for a place on the buyers' waiting list.

  All 350 Jaguar XJ220s were sold on the strength of the original show-car's appearance, and the boom in car values which had led to rampant speculation.

  But the economic climate cooled considerably between the super cars leaving the drawing board and reaching the streets.

   With the world recession, luxury car buyers have become much more careful with their money.

  Fast cars dropped out of fashion so quickly the market dried up, leaving manufacturers with expensive, unsold stock.

  Some super car customers have resorted to the law courts to try to cancel pending orders for expensive cars, arguing that the changes made to the show car to ready it for production altered the car too much for the order contract to be binding.

  The Jaguar XJ220 was hit by these wrangles and the car was in danger of becoming a symbol of the greedy 1980s - famous for its girth (at 2.18 metres the XJ220 is the widest car in the world) and exorbitant expense.

  Success on the race track lifts the XJ220 away from the playboy image and, perhaps more importantly for XJ220 owners, it also protects the value of the car.

        Nothing enhances a vehicle's worth more than racing pedigree.



Jaguar proves a roaring success