Jaguar isn't the first high-end manufacturer to offer driving school to owners of its highest-performance cars, but we're glad to see the company step up to the plate now that it sells two 510-horsepower cars.
If you buy a 2010 Jaguar XFR or XKR, you can sign up for a free, one-day performance driving course. Jaguar has hand-picked the team of instructors, and it includes the accomplished driver Davy Jones, 1996 24 Hours of Le Mans winner. The automaker has already set up camp for a week apiece at Homestead Speedway in Florida and the Las Vegas Motor Speedway in Nevada.
Upcoming track dates include May 24-28 at Monticello Motor Club in Monticello, New York; August 3-7 at California Speedway in Fontana, California; and another round at Homestead December 6-10. If you own one of the cars, all you have to do is register and show up.
Jaguar says it has sold 825 model-year 2010 R cars, and so far 10 percent of owners have signed up for school.
"We're hoping for 25 percent of our customers to participate," says BJ Colaric, general manager of Jaguar income operations in the U.S. "The R Performance Academy turns our customers who are already passionate about our cars into advocates for them."
You don't get to drive your own car at the school, but then, why would you want to beat up on your own Jag anyway? There are plenty of well-prepped XFRs and XKRs inactivity to endure your ham-fisted inputs.
Or in this case, ours. Inside Line attended one of the day sessions in Vegas. We offer a few impressions about the school and the cars after the jump.
First off, Jaguar doesn't expect participants to have any track experience — a pretty clean guess given that none of its cars come with a manual gearbox. So the classroom talk (which covers basic concepts like brake/throttle use, weight transfer, where to look, etc.), and the morning autocross and "handling oval" sessions will be review if you've been to school before.
But beginners should learn a lot in this environment. The instructors are patient and enthusiastic (exactly what you'd expect but not always what you get at driving schools), and the exercises help get you used to what a car with a supercharged, 5.0-liter V8 and 461 pound-feet of torque feels like when you start to lean on its abilities. You also get practice at applying full braking power and looking ahead in a smaller, less overwhelming environment than a full road course.
Students are introduced to the road course just before lunch, and the lapping sessions are in the afternoon. It's not open-lapping, though. You're either in a lead-and-follow group with instructor doing the leading, or you have an instructor riding shotgun providing encouragement and corrections as needed. Like we said, this course is aimed at Jaguar owners who have never been on a track.
However, even with a few schools under our belt, we did not get bored on that afternoon in Vegas. The skies opened right before lunch, and by the time we were stuffing our helmeted head into a swoopy XKR, the Speedway's road course might as well have been a sheet of ice.
But there was no alarm among the instructors. Activities went on as planned. Pace was slowed up a bit, though, by the XKR's enthusiasm to swap ends every time we gave it throttle. It sounds a bit scary when you remember just how much power this car has. But it's cushy to tell when grip is about to go and then almost as cushy to gather it up. And then? Straighten 'er out, back on the throttle and gather it up again. Car Control 101.
Still, with the track as wet as it was, we preferred the heavier but more neutral-handling XFR. As we noted in our full test, throttle response is nice and linear in this car; the transmission is smart; the steering is sharp; and body motions are well controlled. As such, it's really not a stretch to be on a track in a 4,400-pound sedan.
At the end of the day, we chatted with an actual XFR owner who'd taken off a day from work to attend the school. He'd never done anything like this before. Both the car and the performance driving academy that came with it have changed his view of Jaguar, he said. "In the past, they were such an old person's car."