This car is unique in the catalogue of X-Types. It is a V6 development car with a supercharged 3.0 litre, petrol engine, six-speed gearbox and all-wheel drive. The six-speed gearbox is from Volvo, who at that time were also part of Ford’s ‘Premier Automotive Group’. The car was developed as a ‘Skunk’ project at the Halewood plant by a group led by Paul Freeman at the request of the company chief designer Dave Mitchell.

They started with a standard production specification estate car. The initial challenge was to fit the supercharged V6 engine under the bonnet without changing the body structure so much that it needed to be crash tested separately.

Paul Freeman spent much time at the Design Studio in Whitley working out how to do this and they were given access to a number of supercharged engines which were stored offsite in a lockup in the Foleshill area of Coventry. These existed as Jaguar had previously carried out a full engineering programme on X400R (R being the suffix for supercharged vehicles), which was stopped as it was felt to be more important for the Company to develop the X400 diesel engine. They managed to assemble a complete engine from the bits in storage and install it. The six-speed Volvo gearbox was installed to cope with the power. A straight through exhaust was specially made to fit the car, but this proved to be far too noisy and had to have baffles installed to reduce the noise level.

After testing in Liverpool, including along Liverpool promenade, it was sent down to Coventry and driven by various people including one who was given a speeding ticket while driving the car in Leamington Spa.

It was used for development testing throughout 2004/5 and gifted to the Jaguar Daimler Heritage Trust by Jaguar Cars in 2008. The original number plate was changed to X400 SVO which relates to the X-Type’s project number ‘X400’.

One of the JDHT Volunteers, Dave Stockbridge, worked on Noise, Vibration and Harshness (NVH) on the original engineering programme, with engineer Gary Furst looking after X400R. The main work was trying to resolve a problem with the level of supercharger whine, which started out as being audible from 100 yards away. Dave recalls “We got it down to acceptable levels by ribbing the intercooler top casting. To pin down timing of this, I recall we were in a meeting with Powertrain NVH on X400R when the planes were flown into the World Trade Centre (9/11 – 11 September 2001). I believe that other X400R engines went to Ford (as the base engine was the Cleveland V6). I think the X400R Vehicle Dynamics was led by the internal Jaguar department (PAT leader Jeff Mitchell?) but the actual work was outsourced to Prodrive”. Their team included  some significant engineers. The team leader was Richard Hurdwell, who had previously developed the chassis on the TR8 rally car and his engineer was Wynne Mitchell who had worked on the Sunbeam Lotus rally car.

X400 SVO has been featured in both Club and classic car magazines on a number of occasions:

• Jaguar Driver – June 2019
• Jaguar World – March 2020