Category: Exotic Sports 
Price Range: £69,505 to £78,400
Performance to match the looks, exquisite ride and refinement.
Boot's too small, cabin's too ordinary.
A brilliant combination of performance, comfort and flair; now with an engine that delivers on the XK's looks.
We drove the XKR on some very fine roads in northern Spain: great bends joined up by long, long straights, with no hedges or anything else to stop you seeing what's ahead. (They're smoother than many British roads, so we'll reserve final judgement on the ride quality until we've driven the Jag in the UK.) We also drove it on some motorways and in small towns with cobbled, hilly streets. And everywhere we drove it, it felt fantastic.
As with the XK, the level of grip available in the XKR is phenomenal and the very stiff, relatively lightweight aluminium chassis is marvellously neutral, giving the impression that you'll go into a gentle four-wheel drift rather than have the front or rear wheels break away. Even with the extra 113bhp, the XKR always feels composed and balanced, and it's clearly capable of coping with far more abuse than we subjected it to.
Our reservation about the XK is that it's a brilliant GT but not a full-on sports car, as it lacks the rawness, edge and feedback of the smaller, nimbler Porsche 911. The XKR is slightly more raw and significantly faster than the XK, but it's also 70kg heavier and still feels more like a grand tourer than a sports car. That's no bad thing; it's a brilliant GT, with a level of comfort and refinement that you might well prefer to the edginess of the Porsche.
The XKR coupe will get to 60mph in 4.9sec (compared to 5.9sec for the XK) and the convertible will go it in 5.0sec (against 6.0sec): both have a top speed limited to 155mph. Not a huge leap on paper, but the manner of its delivery is something to be savoured.
Whereas the XK's V8 develops its maximum of 300bhp at 6,000rpm and 303lb-ft of torque at 4,100rpm, the XKR adds 113bhp and 110lb-ft. And although the maximum power is delivered slightly higher up the rev range, at 6,250rpm, the torque peaks at a handier 4,000rpm. The result is that the XK's slight sluggishness has been banished - although if you want to pootle around slowly you still can, without the Jaguar becoming impatient, unlike many other, more highly strung cars.
The six-speed automatic transmission is the star of the show. If you make the changes yourself through the paddles mounted on the steering wheel, the response feels instantaneous (unless you try to do something very stupid, like change down from fourth to second at 100mph, in which case the system will save you from yourself). You can move the gear lever over to the left for the full manual experience, or leave it in D and use the paddles for some spontaneous intervention. After a while, it reverts to automatic.
Leave it in automatic and it will still make lovely smooth changes, but slightly more quickly than in the XK. If you're driving very hard, it'll hold onto gears to avoid any upsetting mid-corner upshifts, as well as shifting down earlier to ensure the engine is at the right revs to make the best use of its reserves of torque.
And the engine sounds great, with a little blip of the throttle as you shift down.
Latest Readers' Drives About the Jaguar XKR
wrote on 24 03 2007