Jaguar XE 300 Sport sets lap RECORD at old French Grand Prix track

Jaguar XE 300 Sport sets lap RECORD at Circuit de Charade in Clermont Ferrand

The Jaguar XE 300 Sport sets a lap record at a the now defunct former French Grand Prix track at Clermont Ferrand, the first time the track has been lapped in 30 years.

Jaguar XE sales are not quite the BMW 3 Series-bashing levels Jaguar might have hoped for, so to inject some performance fairy dust in to the equation Jaguar has been busy showing us what the XE SV Project 8 can do on the track.

Last year, Jaguar took the SV Project 8 to the Nurburgring and set a new lap record for a production saloon – proclaiming it the ‘Fastest Saloon Car in the World’ – and earlier this month they did the same at Laguna Seca.

But it’s all very well proclaiming how good the XE is by taking a hand-built £150k XE special to the track, but what happens if you take a stock XE out on the track?

Jaguar has done exactly that by taking the XE 300 Sport to a long forgotten French Grand Prix track – Circuit de Charade in Clermont Ferrand – to let the XE 300 Sport strut its stuff, the first time the full 8km track has been lapped in 30 years.

Driver Vicent Radermecker said:

I set the production saloon record at the Nürburgring in the XE SV Project 8 last year and this lap was every bit as demanding. The agility, dynamic handling and all-wheel drive traction of the XE 300 SPORT came into its own on this challenging track.
The longest straight is barely 600 metres, so I can see why drivers used to call this the French Nürburgring. It’s a privilege to drive this track and it’s really special to drive here with Jaguar.

We’re not entirely sure a lap record on a defunct track – which is part public highway – is of any real significance (by what standard do we judge the 4min 9sec lap time?), but it’s good to see Jaguar pushing a regular XE instead of its supercar-bashing SV.