GT2 is shaping up to be the only race series that matters in 2010. And the RSR Jaguar XKR is one of the reasons why...
Deep beneath the sticky swamp canopy, a giant pair of yellow reptilian eyes blink open in the muggy dusk. The Beast is alive. With a snorting, grunting bellow, it coughs awake, scattering armadillos and wild pigs through the undergrowth.
Eat your heart out, David Attenborough. You may have wrestled gorillas and stalked penguins, but you've never tracked a giant metallic lizard through the Floridian swamp. No, this may not be its natural environment but, loose in the wild, The Beast is at one with its jungly surroundings. Its camouflage is near-perfect, just a sweep of haunch and a corner of gaping mouth visible through the thicket. And, of course, those narrow, glinting eyes.
The air is tense. With a snap of twigs and a bassy scream, The Beast bolts, slinking off deep into the damp brushwood. In the heat of the night, the crunching becomes more distant, the swamp once again fading to silence...
Dawn the next day, and The Beast has been captured. Under a heavy, empty sky over Sebring Raceway, a fat-arched, big-winged Jaguar XKR is tethered to a flatbed, green and black and lizard-like. A swarm of black-suited mechanics buzz about it with laptops and spanners while a broad, shaven-headed gent surveys proceedings. Arms crossed, expression impassive, he is clearly the guv'nor.
He is Paul Gentilozzi, and the mechanics are from RSR, his newly formed race team. These are the men who created this feral creature, and who must now tame it in time for an assault on America's GT2 championship - including the 12 Hours of Sebring in March - and, they hope, a class victory in the 24 Hours of Le Mans in June.
Why, you might reasonably ask, is a Michigan-based race team running such a defiantly British car? Well, Gentilozzi and Jag go way back. Most of those Trans-Am victories came in a last-gen XKR, and Paul was the man who took a near-stock XFR to 225mph on the Bonneville Salt Flats late last year, a project he pitched to Jaguar bosses over a bottle of wine at the Festival of Speed. ("And you know that 225 on salt translates to about 245 on tarmac, right?" he grins when I mention it. 245? That's Veyron-fast.)
So, yeah, Gentilozzi knows his Jags. But readying a car to tough it with the big boys of GT2 is a big ask. If you get a bit confused by all the GT racing categories, you're not alone, but essentially GT2s are harder, nastier versions of road-going supercars, but based around the same architecture. Ultimate supercars. In Europe, the GT2 series is dominated by the Porsche 911 RSR and Ferrari F430, while the American championship sees the 911s battling Corvettes for supremacy. It is hard, brutal racing (YouTube ‘ALMS GT2 Laguna Seca 2009' to see just how brutal) against hard, brutal teams. So instead of shipping an XKR to the States, ripping it to pieces and rebuilding it from the ground up, Gentilozzi worked from the start with Jaguar's engineers to create The Beast's bodyshape.
"Ian Callum [Jaguar's chief designer] is a fantastic guy," says Gentilozzi. "When we visited their factory, Ian opened up his computers and said ‘We want to do this'. In the past, we've been reluctant to have factory engineers design a race car because they don't always think as racers - about air management, downforce, the little things that differ from production cars - but in this case, we all worked together."
This is, in other words, the nearest thing to a Jag factory racer in the world. It was, it should be recorded for posterity, Jag's design department that came up with the inspired green-on-black colour scheme, for which someone surely deserves to be shortlisted for the Turner Prize.
The Beast retains most of the production car's lightweight aluminium body - the roof, doors and rear deck are straight off the production line. "We could've made carbon doors and saved maybe three pounds," says Gentilozzi, "but the stock doors are so strong and so light already that there was no need. "The 5.0-litre direct-injection V8 is surprisingly close to stock, too. "You could take the block and the head out the road car and drop it in," reveals Gentilozzi. "The basic architecture is ideal. We had to work hard with Jag's engineers to tune it for racing - this is the first time anyone's used direct injection."
The Beast has, however, been shorn of the production car's supercharger. "We could run the supercharger within the regulations," admits Paul, "but we haven't figured out how to make it work to our advantage yet. You don't see a lot of superchargers in racing today, but we'll keep working on it..."
Even without the supercharger, Gentilozzi reveals The Beast is putting out "well over 500bhp". Combine that with a kerbweight around 1,200kg and giant, sticky tyres and you're looking at a mighty serious race car. Sat in the single bucket seat (left-hand drive, naturally), the dash is a 1960s Apollo space mission: all switches and buttons and bundles of loose wires. It isn't as cramped as you might expect in here - the XKR is the biggest car in GT2 - but when the big V8 fires into life, the din is mechanical and deafening.
Up and running around Sebring, and the noise is building, a proper meaty V8 banshee with a vicious snarl on the overrun. Sebring seems an apt place to test such a feral thing. Built on a World War Two air base in the depths of the steamy Floridian flatlands, it is a brutal track, a circuit with a reputation for devouring the weak and punishing the overconfident.
All afternoon, The Beast pounds round Sebring, lap after lap as Gentilozzi wrestles it into submission. Occasionally it dives back into the pits, the RSR team tweaking the set-up for The Beast's first competitive outing, right here for the 12 Hours of Sebring in March. Gentilozzi reckons the Jag will be on the pace of the 911s and Corvettes from the first race, and could surpass either as the dominant marque in the series: RSR plans to build a whole bunch more XKRs to sell to customers around the world. "One day we hope you'll see as many XKRs as 911s," he says. "We might insist they keep our livery though..."
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