► We drive the new Jaguar F-Pace through Montenegro
► Big blue cat boldy goes where no Jag has gone before
► Mountainous roads, hairpins, and beautiful scenery
From shoreline to sky: the first climb. Not so much as a blink on the instruments, let alone anything so uncouth as detectable intervention. Clearly I’m not trying hard enough, though the flying water bottles and the thump of displaced luggage in the Jaguar’s vast boot would imply otherwise.
Previous experience would suggest that uncorking an engine as well-endowed as Jaguar’s 375bhp, 516lb ft supercharged six at this precise moment in a hairpin bend – when all four tyres are working to keep you from sliding wide, drifting over a foot-wide strip of scrub and plunging right back to the shoreline you left ten minutes ago – should result in a mess of blurred wheels, yelping revs and whoopsie-daisy corrective lock for the next 50 yards.
But no. The V6 floods the F-Pace’s transmission with torque, trying first to send it all to the rear axle and then, when that comes back with a convincing doctor’s note, punting the overspill forward. (Earlier, Jaguar development engineer Andy Mould told me that, in his opinion, fewer cars give their stability system an easier time – seems he has a point). And so, with nothing more dramatic than an unseemly turn of speed and some truly spectacular exhaust noise, the car launches from the hairpin like a cat from a cold bath and on, like a force of nature, to the next.
And the next. There are perhaps 1000ft between the summit of this gut-wrenchingly steep rock slope and the soporific murmur of the Adriatic lapping Montenegro’s staccato coastline far below. There must be 30 hairpins between the two, some linked by short straights rendered almost non-existent by the Jaguar’s impressive reach (0-60mph in 5.1sec), others by sinuous S-bends surging past skeletal orchards, lonely churches and bus stops for the very patient.
This place, every inch as rugged as its name – black mountain – would suggest, does hairpins very well; mostly wide, mostly layered with complex cambers, always set against a spectacular backdrop. Today, as we fight to cover more than 300 miles and climb from this country’s shoreline to its very summit, there promises to be hundreds of them. But first, time to re-pack the boot…
‘You see, 110kph, now you must pay’
I feel helpless, like I’m watching through glass; my hands immovable, my screams mute. Rolling in a slow convoy of traffic along a meandering trunk road, the first I saw of him was the Cayenne’s black nose at my side window. So he’s overtaking. Interesting. He has speed but he does not, so far as I can tell, have any meaningful view ahead, or any idea if anyone might be coming the other way.
Inevitably, someone comes the other way. Too far in to bail out, the Cayenne ploughs grimly on, accelerating at the oncoming Clio he may yet obliterate, only to finally pass the truck ahead – which didn’t even consider lifting off, naturally – and dives in, crossing back over the double white lines that might, before this whole grim affair played out in slow motion, have sowed doubt in his mind from the beginning. Close? I’ve stopped breathing.
Serene in the Jaguar, the nav ticks a steady countdown to the good stuff. After the riotous initial climb inland from Kotor Bay, we drop down onto the plains of Podgorica and join absolutely everyone else on Montenegro’s busiest road north. Rank and file is the same as it is almost everywhere else in world: beaten but unbowed W123 Mercedes. Long after the end of days, when men are gone and the Earth is at peace once more, scars of concrete and wind-weathered steel cable will stand with W123 Mercedes as the only evidence that we once held sway.
Inexplicably common here too are Mk2 Golfs, their Bauhaus lines and distinctive round lamps further testament to entropy-defying German engineering. They share the road with a bizarre assortment of nearly new Renaults, nearly dead Russian stuff and HGVs so overloaded they’d crush any weighbridge they were waved into.
Past us scrolls a landscape of two halves. At the roadside, a teenager’s bedroom of a mess: rubble, apparently abandoned vehicles and part-finished architecture that’s all brutal breeze blocks and set-square lines. Beyond it, like a Tolkien allegory for the blight of man on the natural beauty of the world, the mountains: ever-present and growing gradually more defined as we close on them.
At least the F-Pace is a fine place in which to sit and be patient. The Launch Edition’s (£65k, 2000 globally, 200 for the UK, all gone) seats, swaddled in gorgeous light oyster leather embossed with houndstooth, are magnificent – as good after 500 miles as they feel after five and, in a car with more rubber on the road than an 18-wheeler and 375bhp of go, with a suitably firm grasp of your squishy form. Similarly the wheel is an easy steer, with plenty of adjustment and a beautifully intuitive effect on the way the car turns that speaks of untold hours of calibration work.
So the basics are very good, as is the layout of the cockpit as a whole, with nice design touches and resolved ergonomics (seat pre-sets where the window controls should be aside) that delicately balance the lofty airiness you expect of an SUV with the snug embrace you want from a Jaguar. There’s practicality here too, from the generous space Ian Callum’s exterior shape yields for rear-seat passengers to a parcel shelf that folds into the boot, power-drop rear seats and gesture-prompted tailgate-release.
A shame then that, like the XE, XF and F-type from which the F-Pace borrows much, the general quality of materials is underwhelming. For every nice touch, like the elegant driver’s grab handle on the transmission tunnel, there are less successful elements, like the incongruous juxtaposition of ‘lounge lighting’ and fake carbonfibre.
From Jaguar’s vast options list it’ll be possible to configure something far more restrained and successful, but you can’t get round the less-than-gorgeous plastics, the fussy HUD or Jaguar’s almost-great InControl Touch Pro infotainment, which always feels a few frustrating wrong turns short of truly intuitive. From the way the F-Pace looks and drives you get the feeling some very determined people fought some very determined battles to avoid dilution. On the inside that doesn’t feel the case. You wouldn’t decide against an F-Pace on grounds of its interior, but neither is it going to seduce any floating voters.
Up ahead, empty road finally beckons, a gaggle of cars and a struggling fuel tanker the last hurdle. We’re past in a heartbeat, hurtling into clear air and enjoying at last the chance to run into the uphill turns at a speed of our choosing, the car hugely reassuring in the way it checks body roll and falls onto an almost perfect interpretation of the line you had in mind with a single steering input. Accurate, intuitive steering and fine body control are the car’s greatest assets. Tingly-palm feel doesn’t feature – perhaps it makes itself known right at the giddy limits – but in every other regard this is a dreamy electric power steering set-up.
We power on, hearing growing mute as gained altitude brings with it temporary deafness. Finally with the space to shine, the F-Pace feels fabulous. Weird then that a Renault Megane is a gaining on us. Weird too that blue lights blaze from its grille. Ah.
What follows is a masterclass in polite, revenue-centric lawenforcement. There’s no shouting, no lecture, no beef. The F-Pace, he tells me, is beautiful; perfect. The fine, he announces after no small dramatic pause, is €20. We must follow him, which is difficult since he spends the next ten minutes merrily busting the speed limit. The post office is an austere, airless building in the centre of Nikšić; one cashier, one queue, lots of cigarette smoke and stacks of yellowed forms, the tip of a bureaucratic iceberg so pointless it makes you feel light-headed.
Ten minutes later I’m a free man, or at least I will be just as soon as I can clear the crowd surrounding the Jaguar. Who am I to disagree with this burly, tracksuit-clad style council? Few would argue that the F-Pace isn’t a fabulous looking car: short of overhang, wickedly sculpted of flank, it looks every inch the escaped show car. Sounds every inch a sports car when you start it, too. Phones come out, impassive faces break into mile-wide smiles and we leave.
Run to the hills
Mellow spring sunshine breaks through rolling cloud in great shafts of golden light, speeding the end of last winter’s freeze. The tarmac – finally empty, finally smooth – snakes through great plumes of snow at the roadside and a landscape of quite startling beauty. The F-Pace feels imperious, rolling with a luxurious surfeit of power, agreeable cabin refinement and suspension that, on these main roads at least, does an admirable job of delivering a cosseting ride on those enormous rims.
Yes, one of the diesel engines would give greater range for a given spend, but the supercharged V6 is such a disarming engine, hauling what is a big and not particularly light car past whatever’s in the way in moments and removing the tiresome physics from long climbs and scorching starts. Still, it’s taken a bit of tweaking to get things just right, with a visit into the Dynamic-i menu (on cars with InControl Touch Pro only) to team the weightier steering and quicksilver throttle response with the lazier gearbox setting and the softer dampers.
Fail to do so and the car can get uncomfortably close to jittery, while the gearbox’s unrelenting quest to always be in just the right gear quickly grows maddening, the V6’s pretty vocal exhausts betraying every pointless shift. The eight-speed ZF is a fine transmission but does such a well-endowed engine really need such a sycophantic gearbox? You get the feeling this engine would be happy with a four-speed manual. I would be. The closest the F-Pace can get to that – using the shift paddles – becomes second nature, the gorgeous engine’s flexible delivery doing the work as effortlessly as the fuel gauge falls…
Fortunate then that at Plužine, an outpost of a town perched on the shores of an azure lagoon sunk so deep into the rock that the sun’s lost by mid-afternoon, we find fuel. Not long now to the P14, listed variously as a most picturesque drive and one of Europe’s most dangerous roads. It is, it will transpire, both.
Road of roads
As junctions go, it’s intriguing: straight on for more smooth, wide, perfectly surfaced lakeside progress or turn right into the dank, unlit tunnel of fallen rock and promise? Headlights blaze into life, cutting through the gloom, any vestiges of mid-afternoon fatigue stripped away by the F-Pace’s V6 thundering away in this rough-hewn crawlspace of a tunnel. In a storm of blue paint, huge wheels and noise we storm back out into daylight, flitting left and right as the single-track does the same, its route dictated by the vagaries of the towering rock-face to which it clings.
There is no run-off, just a foot-high berm of displaced sand and stone. The fall beyond would be enough to make a glitterball of the Jaguar, and jam of me. Still, this doesn’t feel like the time for inch-by-inch, beard-and-fleece off-roading. It just wouldn’t be very Jaguar. So I dare to carry more speed, trusting in the car’s huge reserves of grip, and tapping into the power with sufficient lack of delicacy to prompt a little engine-induced tightening of line. It’s incredible how, on this tightrope of a road, the F-Pace fails to feel anything like the 1900kg five-seater it is. From the driver’s seat the sensations are of a car defiantly resistant to inertia, which is some impressive witchcraft.
On we climb, tight turns and dark tunnels contrasting with short, sharp blasts and blinding sunlight. Occasionally I glimpse the road high above, a hewn rock face or glimpse of concrete a clue as to where I’ll be in perhaps 30 seconds time. The F-Pace works tirelessly, steering sweetly, blatting up every incline like it’s an easy descent and generally inspiring (too much?) confidence.
Oncoming traffic is mercifully rare, though at one point Montenegro’s Sébastien Loeb (less talented, half his age and driving an old Golf, naturally) comes howling into view, all four wheels locked, engine stalled, his face a picture of barely-contained panic. The F-Pace’s brakes are somewhat more powerful, though never quite as effortless as you might want, that final but all-important slug of deceleration requiring more pedal effort than is entirely comfortable.
What are you doing here?
In an impossibly vast and elemental landscape of monolithic mountains, snow-scudded steppe and timber dwellings so flimsy they might fall with the next gust, he wrestles the engine from his Soviet Fiat 500 clone. He has no workshop, just tools, determination and time. Up here, you feel, there is plenty of time.
Freed from a car that looks older than the rock on which it stands, he sets the engine down on a log with the tenderness of a new father. Wind gallops across the open land, clawing at skin so leathery he’s a National Geographic cover waiting to happen. Wired from eight hours’ hard driving, the last stretch of which was so spectacular my eyes won’t blink, the F-Pace rolls to a stop, ticking furiously and smelling of heat. Climbing out, this place feels like the very top of the world: bright, clean, wild, special. I smile and kill the engine. The sudden silence is deafening but the discord soon fades, my ears adjusting to an altogether softer soundtrack of wheeling birds, the breeze and melt water.
He looks at me, frowns, then takes up his tools once more, hammering at a rear bumper that’s nothing but dents. What to say when his car looks like the fruits of an archeological dig and mine, well, mine might be the most incongruous thing I could possibly have arrived in, a £65k party dress with a soundtrack to prompt landslides. In this spec the F-Pace is never destined to go anywhere unnoticed but right now it feels faintly preposterous, standing out like footprints on Mars. Soon, as the world goes mad for Jaguar’s very pretty, very talented sports SUV, these things will be everywhere. Perhaps this surreal and wordless moment is the last time anyone will see an F-Pace for the first time.
The specs: Jaguar F-Pace
Price: £65,275
Engine: 2995cc supercharged V6, 375bhp @ 6500rpm, 332lb ft @ 4500rpm
Transmission: Eight-speed automatic, all-wheel drive
Suspension: Double wishbone front, multi-link rear
Performance: 5.1sec 0-60mph, 155mph, 31.7mpg, 209g/km CO2
Length/width/height: 4731/2070/1652mm
Weight: 1861kg
Rating: ★★★★
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