Upington, Northern Cape - It's official (or about to be*): The Jaguar F-Type R Coupé is the fastest production car in South Africa.
On Saturday 28 February, a group of Jaguar staffers gathered on Upington airport's monster runway to watch the 405kW coupé roar into the record books.
The record run was the culmination of more than six weeks of planning, harking back to the 1940s and 50s, when Jaguar set a number of European land speed records with the XK120, notably on the then-unfinished Ostend-Jabbeke highway, which had a perfectly straight section eight kilometres long.
And Jaguar Land Rover SA national aftersales manager Dawie Olivier, a driver with more than two decades of rallying and circuit racing experince, must have been wishing for that extra 3100 metres when he had to hit the brakes to stop the F-Type before he drove off the end of the 4900 metre Upington runway.
CRACKING THE MAGIC ‘300’
For the record to be official, two runs had to be completed - one in each direction - within an hour - while timekeeping officials from Motorsport South Africa measure speed over a one kilometre distance.
On the uphill run Olivier went through the measured kilometre at 288.33km/h, while the downhill run saw the F-Type crack the magic 300km/h mark with an MSA timekeeping readout of 301.03km/h - and on both runs the Jaguar was still accelerating when Olivier ran out of road.
The land speed record comprises the average of the two runs, and now sits at 294.68km/h - cracking the previous record of 287.63km/h, set in 2002 by Mike Griffiths in a Porsche 911 GT2.
“Ultimately, we ran out of space,” said Jaguar Land Rover SA managing director Richard Gouverneur. “The F-Type R is limited to 300km/h, but we decided not to remove the limiter, even though the regulations allow us to - the car we used was exactly the same as the one you can buy off the showroom floor.”
*Provisional record, subject to official classification by Motorsport South Africa, in the week of 2 March 2015.
MSA RULES
Official South African land speed record attempts are sanctioned by Motorsport South Afric. In addition to enforcing safety compliance at sanctioned events, MSA ensures that cars used for production vehicle record attempts are standard and within manufacturer specification.
Vehicles used in official record attempts are submitted to scrutineering both before, during and after events, with scrutineers using a randomly-selected showroom vehicle of the same specification for comparison. Record attempts require two back-to-back runs to be completed, with each run measuring the average speed over a kilometre distance ('the flying kilometre'). The record is declared to be the average speed of both runs.