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

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.

Jaguar XE 300 Sport Lap Record at Circuit de Charade Video