Autocar March 17, 2021

AUTOCAR With more need than ever for engaging, entertaining magazines, we plan to ensure that Autocar will continue to be published in print every Wednesday. You should continue to find copies in supermarkets and other shops each week, so you can grab the latest issue while doing your essential food shopping. We have also prepared some special offers for both print and digital subscriptions to Autocar, so you can continue to receive every issue without leaving your home. For all our best subscription offers, visit themagazineshop.com To receive 13 print issues for £24.70, or a 13-issue print and digital bundle for £37.49, visit themagazineshop.com/aca/DTD21PUBS Autocar is available digitally on: Apple’s App Store Exact Editions Google Play Store Readly Zinio Simply search for ‘Autocar magazine’ on your device. We remain committed…

ONE OF THE GREAT disappointments of the past decade was the fact that the Jaguar C-X75 never made it into production. The closest the supercar ever got to reality in its on/off existence after its 2010 debut was as a Bond villain car in the last 007 movie six years ago. Now it has a second life thanks to an unlikely intervention from a Hungarian industrialist, who has commissioned the C-X75’s designer, Ian Callum, to create a new car in its image. But the model, called the Kincsem, is no slavish recreation of the C-X75 or the turning back of the clock 11 years. It is a modern, forward-looking supercar in its own right, with the kind of styling and technology a C-X75 successor would be looking to deploy. Supercars…

Ex-Jaguar design chief Ian Callum is reviving one of his best-loved designs for a range-extender hypercar that aims to fill the space vacated in 2012 by the stillborn Jaguar C-X75 project, with backing from a Swiss-based Hungarian entrepreneur. The car, costing “several millions”, will utilise top British design and engineering know-how and be built in the UK. It has been named the Kincsem (pronounced ‘kin-chem’) in tribute to a famed Hungarian racehorse that was brought to the UK in the 1870s and won 54 races from 54 starts, scoring its most momentous victories at Goodwood in West Sussex. The project’s instigator, industrialist Tibor Bak, wants to combine “British expertise and Hungarian verve” to create the new car, which will have a carbonfibre monocoque chassis and be propelled by four electric…

When Jaguar first announced its stunning C-X75 concept car, just before the Paris motor show in 2010, the idea was to produce this £1 million-a-time technology flagship in partnership with Williams, building a maximum of 250 cars from 2013 in a factory built especially at Williams for the job. The concept had two small Bladon Jets gas turbines behind the occupants to run the generator that would power its electric drive motors, but when that idea couldn’t be productionised, the car was re-engineered with an extremely highly developed supercharged and turbocharged 1.6-litre four-cylinder and seven-speed gearbox. Working with the car’s four motors, this yielded 888bhp. The C-X75 was capable of a 0-60mph time of 2.9sec, a 205mph top speed and an electric-only range of up to 31 miles. However, financial…

It’s the great groundswell of regret that greeted the 2012 killing of the most beautiful of modern Jaguar concepts that makes you so sure a ‘son of C-X75’ can work now. Since the discontinuation of his fastest and most radical supercar proposal nine years ago, and before leaving Jaguar to set up his own design business, Ian Callum and his team completed an overhaul of Jaguar’s regular models and added cars such as the E-Pace and electric I-Pace. But the Callum creation that lingers in the minds of enthusiasts and on the bedroom walls of young car lovers is the C-X75. It recreates and carries forward the beautiful, complex curves of Jaguars built half a century earlier more successfully than any other recent shape. Even Sir Ralf Speth, the man…

Did you aim to recreate your C-X75 design? “Not at all. Times have moved on. Mind you, there was a lot to like about that Jaguar, and a lot of regret when it was killed. The public response proved that. The Kincsem does contain a lot of the elements and the design approach that I still like in cars of this format. So I suppose influence of one on the other is inevitable.” How is it different? “In lots of ways. It’s 10 years newer, for a start, so processes and materials have moved on. It’s more cab-forward than the C-X75, although that was seen as quite cab-forward at the time. There’s more wedge in the window line, and I’ve tried to come up with a new approach for the…