One of the five Spectre stunt Jaguars is up for sale
Midsize supercar looks pretty good for vehicle built to drive down steps
If you missed your opportunity to own one of Aston Martin’s 25 Goldfinger DB5s, then Kaaimans International in Nottinghamshire, U.K. may have just handed you a lifeline.
It’s a Jaguar C-X75, one — in fact, number one — of only five stunt cars built for the 007 film Spectre, and it’s just gone up for sale.
With a 300-pound Dave Bautista squeezed tightly into the driver’s seat, Jaguar’s mid-size supercar made its cinematic debut in the 24th chapter of the official James Bond franchise.
In it, the C-X75 hunts the martini-drinking, femme fatale-shagging secret agent through Vatican City, surviving narrow Italian stradas, a flight of stone steps, and even a small inferno before 007’s Aston Martin DB10 takes a permanent dip into the Tiber River.
Quite how the film crew managed to work while, presumably, in floods of tears after that destructive shot, we’ve no idea, and it’s never been fully explained how the seven-foot-tall former WWE champion was extricated from his Jag without the Jaws of Life.
Still, all seven examples of the C-X75 prototypes supplied to EON Productions by Jaguar survived filming intact, albeit with considerable work done beneath that gorgeous aerodynamic bodywork.
Unlike the petrol-hybrid-powered concept — developed in association with Williams Advanced Engineering — the five stunt cars are powered by the same 5.0-litre supercharged V8s found in the F-Type SVR and the Range Rover Sport. The eight-speed transmission, though, was simply too big to transplant, given the mid-engine layout. So the V8 is connected to a sequential seven-speed gearbox lifted from the McLaren 650S GT3.
Power and torque are a mighty 542 horsepower and 502 poundfeet respectively, although the latter is deliberately restricted to 350 lb-ft in the first two gears.
Jaguar’s carbon-composite monocoque has also been replaced with a tubular space frame for added durability, and to ensure the supercar didn’t fold itself in half goring down those stone stairs, the droopy springs and dampers from a Porsche 911 GT3 tarmac rally car have also been incorporated.
Neither ABS nor traction control are part of Blofeld’s plan for world domination apparently, although a rally-style hydraulic handbrake was incorporated into each of the five stunt cars.
And yes, there is a 007-style control box of switches in the cabin, just above the “1 of 4” commemorative plaque in this particular example. Mileage is a surprisingly modest 800 kilometres.
Originally unveiled in 2010, the C-X75 concept was a showcase of Ian Callum’s flawless design direction and a celebration of Jaguar’s 75th anniversary (X stood for experimental), but also made a hefty technological statement with its diesel-hybrid powertrain.
This would eventually be replaced with a turbo and supercharged 1.6-L four-cylinder that, when connected with an electric motor on each axle, sent in excess of 800 hp and 1000 Nm (738 lb-ft) of torque to all four wheels.
A limited 250-unit production run had been planned, but the plug — quite aptly — was pulled in 2012 when the worldwide economic downturn made selling a $1-million supercar rather difficult.