Jaguar's 1900bhp virtual racer previews future road car direction

Jaguar’s designers at first developed four competing themes after the GT SV idea was mooted about a year ago, then chose a winning design conceived by 28-year-old, Coventry-trained Oliver Cattell-Ford, who has been a member of Jaguar’s advanced design team for six years.

“I’m proud my design was chosen,” said Cattell-Ford, “but it’s a bit of a responsibility knowing it’s going to be seen and even driven by so many people. In any case, projects like this soon come to involve the whole team. We weren’t tied to a particular date for the car, but we always had an eye on 2030. And Le Mans was also in the backs of our minds.”

The most startling thing about the full-sized GT SV when you see it in the metal is its radical length-to-height relationship: it sits on the same 2721mm wheelbase as its predecessor but is 861mm longer, at 5540mm – around 14cm longer than the latest Rolls-Royce Ghost. Yet it’s only just over one metre tall.

The extra length is all in the rear overhang, added by the dominant, deployable rear wing, whose shape nods to the XJR-14 in the way it wraps over and around the rear of the car. The GT SV’s low, long body is made in lightweight composite. Every surface is new yet this is unmistakably a Jaguar, with surface curvatures and vents reminiscent of the marque’s classic racers in a variety of subtle ways.

There are many clever details, such as Le Mans-style position lights on the body sides, a new, even narrower ‘Jaguar J’ headlight design, twin charging points that recall Jaguar’s twin fuel tanks of the old days, a Perspex grille with subtle cut-outs that refer to the Jaguar ‘leaper’, an SV badge illuminated on the cockpit floor, a light strip on the body’s extreme rear edge and a prominent, no-nonsense pitot tube mid-roof as a strong hint about extreme high-performance. Even the circuit-board livery contains references to the launch dates of the earliest racing Jags.

The GT SV has four in-board mounted Formula E-derived electric motors – one for each wheel – in an integrated powertrain designed at Jaguar Racing. The outgoing Coupé had three motors; only one motor on the front axle. Power from the four-motor set-up adds up to 1877bhp, with peak torque running to 2478lb ft. Each motor puts its power through an individual, single-speed transmission.

The one-motor-per-wheel arrangement allows very accurate, intelligent control of torque distribution across axles, as well as front to rear. Small wonder Jaguar’s quoted 0-60mph sprint time is a spectacular 1.65sec, with top speed estimated at 255mph.

Small wonder also that engineers have designed a special, liquid-nitrogen circuit to cool the battery (carefully positioned for 50:50 weight distribution), allowing it to produce maximum power in longer bursts. On long straights like the Mulsanne at Le Mans, the cooling system will cause the car to blow off steam as it deploys maximum power.

Although Jaguar’s designers have managed to utilise so many familiar styling cues, the GT SV’s primary shape is heavily governed by aerodynamics, designed at Jaguar Racing using the same advanced CFD techniques as for its Formula E racers. The claimed drag coefficient of 0.398Cd sounds high in road car terms but is low for a race car that is always developing downforce that builds to nearly half a tonne at 200mph.

The dominant aero feature is the GT SV’s huge rear wing with a pair of movable flaps at the trailing edge, designed to rise under intelligent control to add braking or downforce when needed, then to retract to cut drag as the car accelerates towards top speed. The GT SV has an enclosed, sculpted floor to feed underbody air smoothly from the huge front splitter to an equally enormous rear-mounted diffuser.

“We’ve developed the GT SV into a credible electric race car with performance on a par with current endurance race cars,” said Jaguar SV aero chief Micheal O’Regan.

The interior detail is far more resolved than other Gran Turismo supercar creations. For one thing, the package can realistically accommodate a not quite centrally seated driver. The helmet-shaped cockpit bubble looks extremely low from outside but the driver still gets a decent view of the road ahead over a low bonnet, between the two large front wheel housings. At the sides, what look like windows are actually inward-looking screens that give 270deg visibility. The seats are one-piece affairs, made of a new carbonfibre material recycled from old Formula E cars.

As part of providing the ultimate virtual driving experience, Jaguar’s engineers have designed a new, powerful, turbine-like sound they’re calling “authentically but futuristically Jaguar” to accompany the stupendous performance as the quartet of motors approach their 40,000rpm redline. Gamers will hear it for the first time early next year.

In the meantime, ahead of the car’s virtual track debut, there’s great confidence in the engineering works. “We had one objective,” said Jaguar SV engineering director Jamal Hameedi, “to take everything that makes the Jaguar GT Vision Coupé special and move it to another level. Our team didn’t just achieve that target: they beat it.”