Jaguar XF getting solid reviews

Now the key is to see if that translates into sales growth.

Posted Today 04:00 AM by Angus MacKenzie Filed under: Auto Review, The Big Picture, Jaguar, Sedans

"Wow!" That's the first entry in the notebook from Saturday morning's run up the Angeles Crest Highway in the supercharged Jaguar XF. The Angeles Crest, with its switchbacks and sweepers that jink and dive and swoop through the mountains behind LA, is one of the world's great driving roads. And on it the new XF proved it's one of the world's great driver's cars. There's a delicacy, a deftness of touch about this car that's preternaturally animalistic: Alert and agile, light on its feet, oily-smooth in its transitions, this Jaguar felt truly cat-like as it sashayed up the Angeles Crest at sport bike speeds. The steering is near perfect in its weighting and linearity; the turn-in response almost telepathic; the ride buttoned down yet beautifully composed. I've had some exhilarating drives on this road, most recently in a Porsche 911 GT2. But I don't think I've driven a better sedan here. Yet. Curiously, there's nothing unique, or even particularly special, about the XF's chassis hardware. The front suspension is double wishbone, and there's a multi-link set up at the rear, fairly standard fare for a car in this class. Okay, the shocks feature Jaguar's CATS adaptive damping technology, but, again, this is hardly a new or unique technology. So what's the alchemy at work here? I know from experience Jaguar's ride and handling wizard, Mike Cross, is one of the best in the business. The quietly spoken Cross is our kinda car guy: A demon driver, race quick on the track, with the innate ability to make almost any rear drive car corner in a lurid tire-smoking drift when he feels like having fun. Yet his cars are anything but the rock-hard, kidney-rattling rides you can sometimes get from enthusiast engineers. Part of the secret -- and only part, for although I've known Mike for years, and been on several very fast and very sideways rides with him in prototype Jags, he won't reveal all the tricks of his trade -- is that Jaguar pays very close attention to controlling the roll rate of the suspension, even when car is travelling in a straight line. The idea, says Cross, is to reduce what ride and handling engineers call "head toss", the side-to-side pitching of your head that occurs when your car rides over bumps on alternate sides. You can feel it in the XF in the way the vertical body movements are so deftly modulated. But that's only part of the story. The XF, like our much-missed XKR long termer, rides beautifully for a car rolling on low profile 20-inch Pirelli P Zeros. It's firm and taut, but never harsh. A constant dialogue from the chassis means you know exactly what's going on where the rubber meets the road, but the conversation is always calm and muted, even when you're driving hard. How? I suspect a lot of time and effort on geometry and bush design, but only Mike Cross and his team really know. Here's what I like most about the new Jaguar XF: I find it somehow reassuring that even in this age of computer aided engineering and zillion gigabyte simulation programs, the auto industry still has black arts that are only truly mastered by their most experienced and talented practitioners. The XF's sublime chassis proves beyond question that when it comes to fine tuning ride and handling, there is simply no substitute for the human touch.