Photo of the day: Jaguar Project 7s invade Australia

Australia is a very, very long way from Jaguar’s SVO skunk works department in Coventry, England. 

But the first JLR Special Ops car – the F-Type-based Project 7 – has finally landed Down Under. And not just one of them, but ten of the noisy blighters.

To mark the occasion, they all lined up opposite the Sydney Harbour Bridge, pointed their collective 40 exhausts at the iconic arch, and gave a 5,670 horsepower salute. 

If you need reminding, the Project 7 was the first official, production car you could buy from JLR’s SVO offshoot. It was an F-Type that’d lost its folding roof entirely, but added a D-Type-esque hump behind the driver, a wider, deeper front bumper and splitter, a longer rear diffuser, a whopping great big rear wing and lots of carbon trim.

And thanks to a 5.0-litre supercharged V8 in the front with 567bhp and 517lb ft, it’s capable of 0-62mph time in 3.9 seconds, an 186mph top speed and a whole lot of racket. There has surely been no better car for a tunnel run.

We refer to the Project 7 in the past tense because only 250 of the £135,000 Le Mans-inspired limited-editions were made, and they’re all sold out. In the UK we only got 80 of them, which seemed small. But Australia’s entire allocation is in the picture above.

And don’t they look spiffing?