Jaguar Land Rover bespoke kicks off at Goodwood

New JLR special vehicle operation previews Range Rover Sport SVR at the Goodwood Festival of Speed.

A hulking SUV seems like a strange way to start a new high-performance division — but not at Jaguar Land Rover. It is using the coming Range Rover Sport SVR to show just what it can do, starting with a weekend tease at the Goodwood Festival of Speed for its boxy-bodied supercar.

“It’s happening. It’s got to happen. We’ll build it for next year,” says John Edwards, who has recently taken the reins at JLR’s new Special Operations division, talking about the SVR.

Edwards has 500 staff at his disposal including 200 engineers, and a broad brief that covers JLR’s bespoke, heritage and special ops projects.

The Jaguar Project 7 retro roadster is under way but the Range Rover SVR — a 400kW variant of the Sport — is really going to make an impact.

Says Edwards: “People have been speculating about the car for a long time in RS form. But it’s not RS, its SVR. It’s still got camouflage, it’s still in development but it’s here. And it sounds great.”

Edwards has much to talk about but he cuts quickly to the chase, covering everything from bespoke cars to changes in the naming of JLR’s performance models to the creation of six hand-built “continuation” versions of the 1960s lightweight E-Type, all pre-sold at more than $2 million each.

“We don’t want to do horrible bling cars. We’re in the business to do tasteful bespoke,” he says. “As a business we’ve got to a position where we’re at the critical mass.

"We want to go to the next step. The opportunities are endless. But ... we have to decide which is the best one. Our proposition is slightly different. It’s a broader proposition. All-terrain performance is another obvious area.”

But it’s the go-faster models that will create the cut-through for customers. “Land Rover has never had a performance brand. It does now,” he says. He is clear on the brief for anything that wears an SVR badge.

“We want the cars to have integrity and be demonstrably a step ahead. It could apply to any product, but we’ve only confirmed this SVR,” he says.

“What we want to do is more special cars. And the clue is in special cars.”

It’s a very British approach to a motor show, with the very latest sharing space with the vintage and the quaint.