Jag XJ220 Transit

[Nodz86]

As a few of you may recall, a few nights ago on the box I said about an XJ220 Transit but no one knew what I was on about, so here is the thread I said I'd make about it.

 

It was built by TWR in the early 90's as a rolling testbed. It was lighter than the 220 & would hit 60 quicker! Top speed at Millbrook was 170 mph. One lucky engineer (Patrick Walker) used to take it home at weekends for milage accumulation. The van was built to drive in city traffic and was a very important part of the XJ220 development as they had the test track at Millbrook to do the high speed work but nothing would test the car in city traffic,and Jaguar would not like to have bad press with a 220 at the side of the road, so the van was built as a test bed for every day driving in gridlock conditions. It is basically an XJ220 with a Transit Bodyshell stuck on top of it.

 

 

Heres a bit more I found from this PDF. Its an article from octane magazine.

‘We look after seven of the pre-production cars,’ says Don,

proudly. ‘The first two were nothing like a 220 and had scissor

doors. The third was the first one to look like a 220.’ And what’s

this? It’s a Ford Transit.

Don explains. ‘We went to TWR to buy the last engine and

some spares. “Is there anything else?” we asked. “Only the

secondhand engine in a van,” they said. I thought they meant an

engine on a pallet that happened to be in the back of a van, but

it’s a complete XJ220 under the Transit shell.

‘It was an XJ220 mule. They were going to scrap it when TWR

was liquidated but I rescued it. It looks just like a twin-wheel

Transit apart from the XJ220 wheels, and it’s road registered.’

The Transit XJ220 once did 179mph around the Millbrook test

track’s bowl, and it made an appearance at last year’s Festival of

Speed in the livery of Goodwood’s usual Transit fleet.

 

Video of Turbo glow from it and the niose it makes

[HavockJoker]

That is pretty wikid. Very smart for them to test it that way.

[Camel]

Can I have it, that would be sweet, pull up at traffic lights and race a chavy car with it, i would love to see the look on there face.

[HavockJoker]

Can I have it, that would be sweet, pull up at traffic lights and race a chavy car with it, i would love to see the look on there face.

So would I:)

[DriftNismo]

Haha, that's brilliant, but the Ford Supervan 3 still wins my heart :D.

http://i151.photobucket.com/albums/s135/666hz/van/supervan3.jpg

Me and my mate actually convinced about 25 people in our year last year at school that we actually owned the Supervan 3 and kept it at Santa Pod most of the time :D. Everyone was telling us to re-spray it bright green and pink and put a Ferrari engine in it lmao :D. Stupid people who know nothing about modifying.

[Mb]

TDU Xj220 sounds pretty close in some parts :p

[YeOldeTDUMan]

thanks Nodz for a great find ... yeah you'll be amazed at some of the 'test beds' us engineers come up with ... never heard of that one tho.

[Car Freak]

That's an awesome thing to behold! I'm really surprised how complete the whole thing looks. Most mules look like extremely badly made/distorted replicas of the cars they're trying to impersonate... That was some great thinking by Jaguar back then

[Eudemon]

Haha now I see it I do remember seeing that years ago. Cheers for the refresher Nodz, the Espace F1 will always be my favourite mad van though, I mean just listen to this thing !

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4dzQCjcluU

(Real ear fun starts about 1m30s)