ITALIAN racing red. Possibly the coolest car colour on earth, on any make of car. But put it on a the sleek, ultra savage looking 2016 Jaguar XF R Sport, with its black inserts and black mesh grill, and you have a whole other level of sexy and cool.
It’s definitely a muscled up looking Jag, the big brother of the outstanding XE model range, our road test vehicle was powered by the 132kW 20d engine, part of the Jaguar Ingenium engine suite – with the diesel engine capable of zero to 100km/h in 8.1 seconds.
Butted up against an eight speed automatic gearbox, the XF R Sport engine produces a super impressive 430Nm of torque the XF R Sport can be sluggish off the line, but once it’s up and moving, it genuinely wants to haul arse like a good Jag should (replace this engine with the 177kW 4-cylinder petrol or 250kW V6 petrol engine – and party becomes the R Sport’s middle name).
The spec sheet for the XF R Sport is pretty impressive too, you’ll find special R Sport 19-inch diamond turned five spoke alloy wheels, an R-Sport body kit including sport front bumper, side sills and boot mounted spoiler, and sports suspension (that makes this car great fun to drive).
Inside, there’s technical mesh and Taurus leather sports seats with cool R Sport branding, metal tread plates and a multi-function steering wheel, interior mood lighting and carpet mats. The info-tainment system (InControl), while being laggy and sometimes annoying is user friendly enough and looks the goods (even if it doesn’t always play nice).
On the safety front, there’s excellent bi-function Xenon HID headlamps with power wash, and our test vehicle was fitted with a host of extras including a sunroof, HUD, heat-reflecting windscreen, autonomous parking, and blind-spot monitoring with closing vehicle sensor and rear cross-traffic alert.
We also had lane-keeping assistance and driver alertness monitor, and DAB+ digital radio reception. The problem is many of these are not free add-ons, instead heading up a large and sometimes expensive list of extras that can rack up the cost of this swanky looking car at a rate of knots. We’re not joking here. The add-ons are many and costly.
The 2016 Jaguar XF R Sport comes in an incredible 19 exterior colours, including of course Italian Racing Red, Ingot, Ebony Black, Polaris White, Ammonite Grey, Aurora Red, Caesium Blue, British Racing Green, Dark Sapphire Blue, Glacier White, Odyssey Red, Quartzite, and Rhodium Silver.
Wait, we’re not done yet. Deep breath, there’s more exterior paint colours including Ultimate Black (still our favourite Jag colour), Black Berry, Cosmic Black, Gallium Silver, Storm Grey, and lastly Tempest Grey.
But the gamut of customisation options doesn’t stop there. You’ll also be able to choose from five interior trim choices (that’s just in the seat coverings), three different sound systems to choose from, eight veneer insert choices, including carbon fibre, and four different headlining choices.
But wait, there’s still more. There are add- packs for Active Safety, Cold Climate, Rear Comfort, Power Convenience, Head Up Display (as fitted to our test vehicle), the Black Pack (that makes all the inserts on the exterior, you guessed it, black), and the Advanced Parking Pack.
There’s about another 40 options to choose from, and this review would be twice as long if we listed them all. It’s list price is a little over $88,000 plus on-roads in its most basic form, but optioned up like ours was, you’ll be needing to part with more than $100,000 (plus a bunch of on-road costs as well).
And it would still be worth it, it’s that nice a car, despite its faults and the major increase in costs to make it rock.
Our test vehicle was provided by Jaguar Australia. To find out more about the 2016 Jaguar XF R Sport, contact your local Jaguar dealer.
