Jaguar bosses
have admitted that the firm has started to think about a successor to the
limited-edition Project
7 sports car, Auto Express can reveal.
The first car produced by Jaguar
Land Rover’s Special Vehicle Operations (SVO) division, Project 7 was a
heavily modified F-Typeusing
the same 567bhp supercharged V8 now available in the ‘regular’ F-Type SVR.
All of the 250 Project 7s sold out and second-hand values
have recently started to rise beyond the original £135,000 price. Now senior
Jaguar officials say that early discussions have taken place about how the
company could build
a successor.
When asked if Jaguar would consider custom-bodied cars in
future, design director Ian Callum said: “We’ve thought about it. We’ve started
asking, ‘What do we do after Project 7?’, because I’d like to take it a step
further. And that means making it more of an individual car than an
F-Type.
“But the business
case is hugely difficult,” he added. “What can you
charge for it?What do you charge for a Jaguar? How far can it go? With a
supercar like the C-X75,
you could probably go to £1million, but with a limited number of, say, 200
cars. And even that, as a business case, was pushing it. So if you’re going to
get into the realms of something that’s a modified F-Type, it’s very
difficult.”
John Edwards, boss of Jaguar Land Rover Special Operations,
said the success of Project 7 had taken management by surprise. “We said we’d
build 250 examples of Project 7, and within the business there was quite a lot
of nervousness about that,” he told us.
“We kind of plucked that number out of thin air, really. I
personally had to guarantee we’d sell 250; as it turned out, we could have sold
500.” Edwards stated he’d “made a conscious decision” to make SVR performance
Jaguars four-wheel drive – potentially leaving space for more extreme
rear-drive editions like the Project 7.
However, he indicated that SVO would focus on production
runs of cars, rather than exclusive bespoke one-offs. “Custom bodies are not
our plan; we want to push the cosmetics of the car to the limit, not
re-engineer the car as some others have done,” Edwards said
source: http://www.autoexpress.co.uk/jaguar/f-type/95233/next-jaguar-project-7-to-be-even-bolder
by John Mcllroy
http://www.boscheuropean.com
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