2008 - Issue 2

The Jaguar Magazine provides an insight into news and developments from Jaguar, as well as reliving key moments from our history. To read a selection of articles from Issue 2, 2008, please click on the articles below.

• MEET RATAN TATA

  It's like a royal visit here at Jaguar's Corprate Headquarters at Whitley, England. Men in sharp suits stride around purposefully checking and re-checking schedules. A chauffeur-driven XJ murmurs quietly, waiting to whisk the VIP onto the next engagement where a line of people is eager to meet him.

• WELCOME TO THE MILLE MIGLIA

  Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum. You can hear your pulse pounding in your brain like Charlie Watts' drums. Just like in the movie Le Mans, when Steve McQueen is on the start-line in his Gulf-Porsche 917, there's noise all around, but inside your head, all is quiet. Apart from that thumping heartbeat.

• PURE ALUMINIUM

  So what's the big deal about aluminium? Beneath every XJ's multiple layers of mirror-finish paintwork is a body structure elaborately constructed of the famously lightweight stuff. Cars that are lighter can accelerate faster, handle with more agility, stop more eagerly, use less fuel and produce fewer emissions.

• LET THE TRAIN TAKE THE STRAIN

  There's no blowing of whistles. No waving of flags. Quietly, discreetly, at precisely 5.30 every weekday morning, the Jaguar Express leaves a leafy railway siding outside Birmingham. Inside its two-tier covered wagons, safely protected from the elements, are 176 brand new XJs, XKs and XFs bound for England's south coast and then destinations around the world.

• AUDIOMOTIVE

  So how does a Jaguar sound? Does it roar? Or growl? Does it purr? And we're not talking about the four-wheeled Jaguar here, more the jaguar of the four-legged kind.

• 1953: LE MANS C-TYPES ARRIVE HOME

  After their 1953 Le Mans tour de force, Jaguar's C-types returned to pomp and ceremony at Browns Lane. The Le Mans 24 Hours of 1953 was a milestone for Jaguar. The company's C-types, equipped with revolutionary new disc brakes, were in a class of their own.

• A CAT'S TALE

  It's October 21, 1953. Between the Belgian towns of Bruges and Ostend, a Jaguar XK120 flashes along the Jabbeke straight, an empty stretch of Belgian autoroute. Sealed inside is Norman Dewis, Jaguar's chief test engineer, watching the speedometer's needle climb as he attempts to achieve a new world record for a production car.