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Jaguar designs Tour de France racing bike [w/video]

Jaguar is known for designing luxury sedans, and it's known for designing GTs. But once in a while it dabbles in a new area of transportation design. It's working on its first crossover at the moment, and even did a speedboat concept a couple of years ago. Now it's turned its attention to bicycles.
While many automakers have designed bikes in the past, Jaguar's project has a bit more of a direct correlation. It's been working with Team Sky - the outfit that has won the Tour de France two years running now - since 2010, furnishing the team with support vehicles for bicycle races around the world. But now it's stepping its collaboration up a notch by redesigning the team's bike.
Working with frame manufacturer Pinarello, Jaguar took the existing Dogma 65.1 racing bike design back to the drawing board. Jaguar's designers and engineers reshaped the frame tubes, seat post, front fork, derailleur and all the components attached to the frame, each part streamlined for aerodynamic efficiency. They ran it through Jaguar's Computational Fluid Dynamics processor 300 times then verified the results in the wind tunnel.

Jaguar to follow up with larger J-Pace crossover

Jaguar is about to launch its first foray into the crossover market (that's the C-X17 Concept you see above) with the upcoming debut of the F-Pace, but that won't be its last. According to the UK's Car magazine, plans are already underway to launch a bigger J-Pace crossover as well. Just as the F-Pace is set to serve as the high-riding counterpart to the XF sedan, so too would the J-Pace align itself with the upcoming new XJ – in a strategy not unlike what Mercedes is taking with its crossovers, aligning the GLE (nee M-Class) with the E-Class, the upcoming GLS (GL-Class) to the S-Class and so on. That would make the J-Pace a rival to the likes of the aforementioned GLS and Audi Q7. Tipped to launch in 2019, the Jaguar J-Pace is expected to borrow its aluminum underpinnings from the flagship Range Rover, but take a sportier, more dynamic approach than the top-of-the-line Landie. Expect V6 and V8 engines to be offered, alongside diesel and hybrid powertrain options. The J-Pace has reportedly won out over other proposals to expand the XJ family with coupe, convertible and wagon variants, as the crossover is expected to drive higher sales. Here's hoping those revenues could be poured back into those back-burnered projects, too. Related Video:

Jaguar practiced the E-Pace barrel roll - wait, how do you practice a barrel roll?

Jaguar launched the E-Pace compact crossover by literally launching it into a barrel roll. But to get to the point where the company could do the stunt in front of the press naturally took plenty of preparation and planning, and the company documented much of it in the video above. It turns out that the early stages of preparing the stunt are about as entertaining as the stunt itself. The video spends a little time showing some of the computer modeling and designing of the stunt, but most of the video covers the practice runs done with a test car. Jaguar set up its prototype offset ramp for initiating the roll, and had a massive airbag set up for the test car to land in. And early on, to make sure the stunt driver wasn't hurt, they rigged up a Land Rover Evoque with autonomous driving equipment to do the first runs. Later the stunt driver took a few turns. The testing resulted in flips and tumbles you've only seen with Hot Wheels cars. It's so strange and fun to see a full-size car launched this way. Once the team finally had the jump pretty well dialed in, the stunt driver was able to test it launching from ramp to ramp, and then eventually do it in the production E-Pace at the crossover's reveal. Related Video: Image Credit: Jaguar Jaguar Crossover Luxury Videos jaguar e-pace