Before the Jaguar C-X75 makes its big screen debut in the James Bond movie Spectre, Jaguar handed it over to a very special test driver. Felipe Massa doesn’t have a license to kill, but he is a Formula One driver with the Williams team. And he seems to approve of Jaguar’s hybrid supercar that might have been.
In the video above, Massa puts the C-X75 through its paces in Mexico City. The car looks great at speed, and Massa serves up an entire box of donuts. In the movie, the C-X75 will be driven by the villain Hinx, played by Dave Bautista. We’ll see how his driving (or rather, that of the stunt drivers) compares.
This short romp and the Spectre car chases will probably be the only times most people see the C-X75 in action. Jaguar brought it out of mothballs for this movie, but gave up on putting it into production years ago.
The C-X75 was first shown at the 2010 Paris Motor Show with a plug-in hybrid powertrain that included two turbine engines. It could have been Jag’s answer to the Ferrari LaFerrari, McLaren P1, and Porsche 918 Spyder, and indeed the British firm tried to get it into customer hands. It contracted with the engineering division of the Williams F1 team, and replaced the turbines with a 1.6-liter piston engine. Eventually, though, the project was scrapped.
Jaguar’s companion brand Land Rover also provided some vehicles for Spectre, including modified Defenders and a Range Rover Sport SVR. All of the vehicles were prepped by Jaguar Land Rover Special Vehicle Operations (SVO), the company’s division for limited-edition models and other specialty projects.
Meanwhile, Bond himself will drive the new Aston Martin DB10. It’s a car designed specifically for Spectre, and won’t be offered for sale to the public. Most of the handful of DB10s built were probably destroyed during filming, which racked up a car-kill bill of $37 million. You can see the results of that carnage when Spectre opens in the U.S. on Nov. 6.
