Jaguar XKR-S GT to cost £135k (2013)

Jaguar has caved in to customer demand for its hardcore XKR-S GT model, and has announced it’ll sell ten right-hand drive examples to UK customers. The confirmation follows a commitment to allocate 25 to the USA and five to Canada earlier in 2013.

Brace yourself: the XKR-S GT will set you back £135,000. That’s a chunky £37,535 more than the already extreme XKR-S coupe, and makes the XKR-S GT the most expensive Jaguar since the 217mph XJ220 supercar of the early 1990s.

To justify heaping the cost of a new Porsche Boxster onto the XKR-S, the GT model gets an inside-and-out makeover designed to create a racetrack-ready thoroughbred. The combination of front dive-plane winglets and a massive carbonfibre rear wing create 145kg of downforce at the (electrically restrained) 186mph top speed. That aero effect helps knock ten seconds off the 7min 50sec Nurburgring lap time of the regular XKR-S.

Inside, you get 16-way adjustable bucket seats, a handful of GT badges, and a suede steering wheel.

Wait, there’s more. The XKR-S GT boasts a 52mm wider front track to kill understeer, and rides on adjustable Bilstein dampers. Front spring rates are a massive 68% stiffer, and the rears are uprated by 25%. Alloys are a 20in lightweight forged design, wearing sticky Pirelli track-day rubber. The rear tyres measure a whopping 305mm across.

And a serious upgrade to help the XKR-S GT slow down, too: the GT is the first road-going Jaguar to use carbon-ceramic brakes. Despite measuring 398mm up front and 380mm at the rear, the ceramics save 21kg in unsprung mass versus the standard steel XKR-S stoppers.

That’s unchanged from the XKR-S, but we’ll let Jaguar off since it is the company’s most powerful engine. In the nose is a 5.0-litre supercharged V8, as seen in the XJR and XFR-S. It develops 542bhp, which is sent to the rear wheels via a six-speed paddleshift automatic and electronic rear differential.

The £135k XKR-S GT reaches 60mph in 3.9sec – 0.3sec faster than the standard XKR-S.

By Ollie Kew