This Jaguar C-X75 began life as a stunt car for a James Bond movie. And now, uniquely, it’s escaped into the real world
‘The last time I saw the car in motion was in Burbank, California, with Jay Leno driving it,’ remembers Ian Callum, designer of the Jaguar C-X75. ‘So for the next time to see one driving, moving around an industrial estate in Warwick, was quite surreal.’
It’s been a rollercoaster ride for the C-X75: what began as a prospective technical showcase ended up being another unfulfilled hypercar prototype footnote, before finding immortality as a villain’s car in a James Bond film. After celluloid infamy, the remaining stunt cars were sold off on the proviso they couldn’t be driven on the road – yet here we are, watching the sunlight glint off not only an extensively freshened-up C-X75 (Chassis 7) but also the public road it’s legally allowed to drive on.
Perhaps fittingly, it returned to the care of its designer, through the design and engineering consultancy he co-founded, CALLUM. ‘It all began around a year ago,’ says Ian. ‘We were delighted a customer of ours managed to find it and wanted to bring it to life – it was never meant to be anything other than a concept car.’
CALLUM has form for converting low-volume, supposedly ‘track only’ continuation cars into roadgoing vehicles, but those have largely been road-ready cars in all but name. This project was very different. For starters, when the C-X75 broke cover at Geneva in 2011 it employed two Bladon Jets gas turbines as range extenders to YASA electric motors at each wheel, for a range of 559 miles, 780hp and a tectonic plate-shifting 1180lb ft of torque in return for just 28g/km of carbon dioxide.
‘It was all theoretical, but it did drive via an electric motor – that was as far as it went,’ Ian admits. ‘That set-up gave us designers the opportunity to shape it any way we wanted, rather than be driven by other elements, such as internal combustion engines or motors. It was an indulgence of shape and style.’
Sadly, it was an indulgence too far for Jaguar’s management, still feeling the bruises of the worldwide recession stemming from the 2008 credit crunch. That’s a bitter disappointment because, although the project began as a one-off, the reaction from the public at Geneva had galvanised Jaguar’s suits. ‘The powers that be, especially at the Tata end, said “We gotta build this,”’ remembers Ian. ‘We were going to build 200 cars, so I thought I was at least going to see one in my lifetime. Then the market died before the car was finished. Somebody described it as potentially another Jaguar XJ220 moment, 20 years on.’ Ian was understandably disappointed, but he says he’s grown to live with it. ‘Your heart gets broken occasionally and you just move on, don’t you? There are so many things that you create that end up changing hugely or don’t happen – but in this case I understood why it didn’t happen; the timing was all wrong.’
While the C-X75 had survived filming intact, the stresses had taken their toll on a car built only for short, sharp action shots
The project was officially cancelled in 2013, though work continued on four prototypes to develop ideas for the I-Pace, with a hybrid/four-cylinder turbocharged and supercharged drivetrain. All four were retained by Jaguar. However, when James Bond knocks on the door, for manufacturers the answer is generally yes. As was the case with Jaguar, which commissioned Williams Advanced Engineering (WAE) to build six C-X75s for Spectre, the 24th James Bond film, with Jaguar’s fully developed hybrid concept used for static shots. Built around a steel spaceframe with an aluminium floor and a carbonfibre body, the new stunt cars’ power came from a dry-sumped supercharged V8 from the F-type. ‘Hats off to the engineers that worked on it, both the original prototype and the film cars. They made it work,’ Ian says. ‘For the film, the structure was redesigned for a V8 with a transaxle. Because it was designed as a film car, it had fairly massive dynamics to go through.’
Adam Donfrancesco, CALLUM’s co-founder and director of engineering, was the man charged with bringing Chassis 7 to the road, and illustrates that point even further. Though aware of the C-X75 project during a previous time at Jaguar Land Rover, he was taken aback by just how strong the car was. ‘It’s got a 70mm-diameter tubular frame and a 6mm aluminium plate floor. To put that in perspective, a normal supercar has a 2mm aluminium plate floor,’ he laughs, in total admiration for the work WAE did on the car in a very short period. The decision to go ahead with the Bond project was fairly last-minute. Four of the five V8 cars survived filming and, after Spectre’s production was wrapped up, were sold off. Fast-forward to 2022 and British dealer Kaaimans International, based near Nottingham, acquired stunt car Chassis 7 for sale. It soon found a new owner, who brought a fresh mission: to get the car registered for the road. The new owner briefed CALLUM to keep the car as close to the stunt car specification as possible, but improve usability.
‘We were all delighted to do it; it was saving a piece of history,’ Ian says. ‘It was great to see it again, rolling into our studio – it reminded me just how good it was. After working hard during the filming, it was a bit untidy, though…’ While the C-X75 had survived filming fairly intact, the stresses and strains had taken their toll on a car already built only for short, sharp action shots; the stunt cars were a long way from being manicured and showroom-ready. ‘They were never meant to be beautiful in terms of detailing,’ Ian says. ‘Film cars tend to be rough and ready – they go past the camera at 60mph; the “beauty” car [for static and interior shots] was an original prototype from Jaguar.’ Adam elaborates: ‘This was a film prop so a lot of the vehicle had been cut and shut, with harnesses chopped around here and there, plus lots of plugs not going anywhere – however, these are all part of the car’s provenance and expected of a working film vehicle. For road use, it needed some finessing and tidying – the body panels didn’t line up, and you could see daylight through some areas.’
Among the stranger features were mounting holes on the roof for camera gimbals, which were bolted on. ‘In some cases the drivers sat on the roof,’ Adam says. ‘So there were elements inside the car where you wouldn’t want your head swinging around, catching yourself on nuts and bolts welded to the frame.’ Several carbon body parts were replaced, some due to wear and tear, others for more detail and a higher quality of weave and fitment. However, though tidying up the body was a relatively simple process, getting it to a stage where it could be used regularly by someone other than a stunt driver at seemingly physics-defying yaw angles would be less easy.
During initial shakedowns at Turweston Airfield, near Silverstone, the dynamics were deemed to be good, perhaps unsurprisingly for a car designed to be flung around Rome at high speed. ‘It handles much better than you might expect from a prototype. From a damping perspective it’s fairly supple,’ Adam says. However, the Ricardo-built GT3 race-specification centre-mounted clutch made for early headaches. ‘It was difficult to master the clutch; we’d go through a clutch plate in about half-an-hour of gentle driving.’ Adam explains that the clutch stack height was incorrect, which meant the clutch pack wasn’t able to wear properly. With help from AP Racing, plus dimensional analysis of the flywheel, modifications were made to provide more clutch load. ‘It’s a little bit more progressive,’ Adam smiles. ‘You can do 6000km with it now.’
An even bigger challenge came via the fuel tank, which on the original stunt car was made up of two separate ten-litre rotary-moulded FIA-specification tanks, usually found in single-seater racing cars. ‘Obviously you’re not going to get very far with those, from a road car perspective,’ laughs Adam. Using a process of reverse engineering, the single fuel tank now measures 55 litres, and is positioned between the cabin and the engine. ‘We had to steal some “packaging” from various areas to get the tank in, such as moving the pneumatic pump for the transmission, the intake runs from the filters, and we nibbled into the cabin a little to create some more volume.’ In essence, the fuel tank is two main volumes joined together, which required careful thought with regard to surge protection and level readings, but also weight packaging. ‘We changed the fuel tank fundamentally, from an easily surge-proof small box with foam inserts inside, to a bigger-volume tank, in effect two units with a link pipe. We had to understand and manage the fuel supply, pressure and flow,’ Adam explains.
‘We needed to work out the effect of the changes dynamically, so we took the car out and tested it in figure-of-eight for sustained cornering, to see what the fuel flow is like from one side to the other. Then we looked to see if the calibration for the fuel system is correct, whether it’s over-fuelling and what the reserve is like when it’s empty, and what happens when you over-fill.’ A rigorous test programme followed on track to validate the work, trying to wrap up several areas of the car’s build into as few sessions as possible. ‘A lot of the static stuff we can do in-house, such as the headlights – and the emissions, which were the hardest part of this project,’ Adam says. ‘We had fundamental targets to hit, which is a combination of calibration and catalyst technology. We spoke to our supplier and it specced us up some three-way catalysts, engineered them into the exhaust system and we developed it from there. It’s a balancing act; you obviously want to reduce carbon dioxide and hydrocarbons, but not run it too lean.
‘Then you have to combine all that with the noise targets, and while fitting catalysts helps with that, too, we had to redesign the muffler and the exhaust system’s internals,’ says Adam, though he admits it’s certainly not quiet. ‘It’s basically still a very early prototype in terms of NVH [noise, vibration and harshness] attributes – it’s like driving a race car on the road. You really feel the performance [around 500bhp], and it’s got a lovely supercharger whine.’ The process of IVA registration didn’t alter the overall looks of the car, something Adam believes is testament to Ian’s original concept. ‘The visibility angles, and certainly some of the lighting positions, definitely benefited from going through studio engineering, and a greater depth of engineering overall,’ Adam says. ‘They’re the fundamentals of form, and the bits that are very difficult to change – if you can’t get the headlamps or mirrors in the right position, it’s a struggle to work around those things.’
Ian adds: ‘When you’re designing cars, you have a subconscious notion of what is going to be legal and what isn’t. When the car went into the next level of pre-production with intent to build, the engineering teams at Jaguar and WAE were briefed not to change the shape. For the first time in my life, we created something that had no reference to reality whatsoever, yet the demand of the engineers was not to change anything – a totally unique situation.’ Nevertheless, while the overall package was ready to go, the details required plenty of work. ‘Wing mirrors were driven by the IVA requirements, but we went further in terms of making them electrically adjustable,’ Adam says. ‘On the stunt cars they were a high-density foam, which was then painted and stuck on.’
Even getting in and out of the car needed careful thought. ‘No discredit to the person who made the hinges, because he or she did it in a ridiculous timeframe, but you could literally pick up the door and waggle it around,’ Adam laughs. ‘The amount of compliance in the door meant that you would be bouncing off bits above and below the striker, because the stiffnesses in the door hinge and the door itself were never intended for use in a road car.’ Just strengthening the hinge wasn’t the answer, however. ‘The door then started to flex, so we needed to reinforce it – that involved making carbon laminate inside the door, pinning the doorframe to the door bar, and so on,’ Adam adds. ‘I wouldn’t have liked to try to close the original door in any event – you’d have needed someone to help you from the outside.’
The windscreen was also a major source of pain: the stunt cars were fitted with Perspex or a type of glass more for show than road safety. ‘We had to tool up for a windscreen – we needed only two, but the minimum order was 30, so we’ve got plenty of spares,’ Adam says. ‘We also fitted a de-mist system, and a programmable one-blade Bosch wiper.’ The owner didn’t want to stray too far from the prototype nature of the car’s interior, but there were plenty of bungs, lamps, fog lights and instrumentation and myriad small bits that added up to a whole pile of engineering tasks, as well as items such as numberplates, a horn and all the small but essential items to get a car on the road. Along the way, Adam got to witness interesting and innovative use of the Jaguar parts bin, and, in the case of the electric power steering system, from outside it.
‘It’s from a Citroën C1, which is impressive given that the C-X75 is not the lightest car and it’s got some big tyres on it – the steering is lovely,’ Adam says. The dampers, meanwhile, were sourced from a 997-era Porsche 911 rally car. ‘They have an enormous amount of droop travel – if you jack the car up, the tyres aren’t leaving the ground.’ That level of rugged build brings us back to the car’s construction, and a somewhat porky kerbweight. ‘It was set up to be super-safe in the event of someone doing a ridiculous stunt with it, and that comes with weight – I think it’s about 1600kg, and we took 50kg out of it,’ Adam says, indicating that there is further lightweighting to be done. ‘A lot of that lies in the core of the chassis; a chassis of that type should weigh around 150kg, but the C-X75 is probably twice that. It is lovely, though; WAE did a great job – the underpinnings are so solid you could probably do the Dakar Rally in it.’
Though further developments in the project have been hinted at, for now it’s a case of driving it. ‘It’s got the bones of a really good car, and that’s down to the chassis set-up,’ Adam says. ‘It changes direction really nicely. But from a true road car perspective, it’s lacking a few conveniences – you can’t run down the side windows, they’re bonded in a frame like a GT3 racing car’s…’ We’re promised more details on what phase two of the project could entail at a later date, with the owner keen to develop the car further. However, the process so far has given its creator a chance to reflect on a design that’s now more than a decade old yet seemingly hasn’t dated.
‘The most important thing about any car is the silhouette,’ Ian says. ‘The window graphic is very important to me, it always is, and so is the stance; but all these things were in a world of freedom that we’d made ourselves – individual parts were not difficult to do. The proportions are, because you have to get them right – and I think we truly made a car of beautiful proportions. If you asked me to design the car again, I doubt the proportions would change very much, if at all.’ Since the project has come to light, CALLUM has had tentative enquiries from other C-X75 prototype owners, and it all leads to the big question: would CALLUM be willing to produce a limited production run? ‘That’s not really occurred to me, but why not?’ Ian muses. ‘If it was exactly as the car is today, probably yes – but that would be very much down to Jaguar, all we could do is put in a request. We know the car intimately, and CALLUM could engineer it beyond the requirements that were set for the film, resulting in a thrilling road car.’
However the project develops from here, Ian’s simply delighted it was undertaken. ‘It deserved to happen – I really believe that cars don’t have any value until you see them outside, in their natural environment, so to see it coming down the road towards me was an astonishing sight,’ Ian says. ‘It just brings back so many memories of a great time. I hope to take it out myself some time, drive down the A46 and maybe past the JLR HQ in Whitley with a satisfying wave.’
Thanks to the owner and to Kaaimans International (kaaimans.com), plus CALLUM (callumdesigns.com).
