Frankfurt Motor Show: Jaguar F-Pace revealed

The stunt went straight into the Guinness Book of Records as the new Jaguar F-Pace pulled 6.5G around the zero part of the ‘80’ structure built to celebrate the British marque's birthday.

With that, the fiercest rival to the Porsche Macan arrives. The name suggests the F-Pace SUV is made on an F-Type coupe platform, but actually it shares its architecture with the new XE and XF sedans.

As with those cars, Jaguar says it has saved weight in the body – a benchmark 80 per cent aluminium construction – only to beef up the double-wishbone front and rear suspension.

As with all-wheel-drive F-Type, though, the F-Pace system sends all drive to the rear wheels in normal conditions but can split 50:50 in 100 milliseconds. Along with torque vectoring, it’s designed to endow the F-Pace with a “rear-wheel drive character”.

Plenty of torque juggling will be going on with either the 220kW/700Nm 3.0-litre twin-turbocharged V6 diesel and 250kW or 280kW/450Nm 3.0-litre supercharged V6 petrol engines. There’s a 132kW/450Nm diesel tiddler, too, but it won’t see which way a base Macan went.

Conversely the 700Nm oiler claims a 6.2-second 0-100km/h, a tenth quicker than the 580Nm Macan S diesel that weighs a near-identical 1880kg (only 4kg lighter than F-Pace).

The 250kW blown V6 claims a 5.8sec 0-100km/h while the 280kW version (available only on F-Pace S and a First Edition initial limited run) lowers that by 0.3sec. But even then it’s still a tenth adrift of V6 Macan S.

At 4731mm the F-Pace is 59mm longer than XE sedan, with its 2874mm wheelbase stretching 39mm further. At 1936mm the SUV is also 86mm wider and 261kg heavier (comparing RWD XE S to AWD F-Pace S).

Of course all the practical design is there (including a 650 litre boot) and the usual active safety systems and technology (including 10.2in touchscreen and 12.3in HD instrument cluster) are present. The cockpit with a ‘sports command’ driving position closely mirrors its XE stablemate.

What we really want to know is how closely this Jaguar F-Pace comes to knocking on the door of Macan dynamics.

“[We] took everything that gives our saloons and sports cars class-leading dynamics and applied them to all-new F-Pace [to deliver] an unrivalled blend of ride, handling and refinement – on all surfaces,” the British brand claims in its release. We’ll find out mid next year when the F-Pace arrives in Australia.