Jaguar B99 GT by Bertone
Car of the Day #292: 2011 Jaguar B99 GT by Bertone – Modern marvel
![Jaguar B99 GT by Bertone](/content/images/size/w1200/2025/02/IMG_4688-1.jpeg)
To my senses, Bertone and Jaguar go together like Tajín and citrus fruits — tasty.
I’ve previously written about the Ascot, another Bertone / Jag joint, but my favourite collab of these two companies has to be the Jaguar B99 and B99 GT.
2011 was a strange time for Jaguar. Three years after being sold by Ford to Tata, and two years before being fully merged with Land Rover to create the unwieldy Jaguar Land Rover — JLR — the automaker was exploring its options in the freedom of a newly eager investor.
Whether or not you like all, none, or some of Jaguar design chief Ian Callum’s direction with its model range, there’s no escaping that against its 2011 rivals, much of the brand’s product had the allure of day-old cat shit.
Granted, I said as much in the Ascot story: I’m not a Jaguar fan, and the Jaaaaags I tend to swoon over were never touched by anyone with the surname Callum.
Why is this? As a non-expert in this field, I find the atmosphere, vibe, whatever, surrounding what I know to be “British luxury” as leaden, boring, and drab.
To me, and many — as evidenced by the automaker’s need to scrap its entire range in favour of anything different — much of post-Y2K Jaguar’s product and marketing were as alluring as the ingredients to Bovril being read over an airport PA by a Jeremy Clarkson impersonator:
“Beef Broth (50%) [Water, Beef Bones], Yeast Extract (27%) [contains Barley, Wheat, Oat, Rye], Salt, Water, Colour (Ammonia Caramel), Corn Starch, Beef Powder (1%), Flavourings (contains Celery), Flavour Enhancers (Disodium Inosinate, Disodium Guanylate), Acid (Lactic Acid)…POWER!”
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2011 Jaguar B99 by Bertone • via Bertone
Enter Italian masters Bertone.
Italy has fine suits, fine leather, and fine craftspeople who can probably sniff out luxury pretenders from a single beefy fart. In 2011, celebrating its 99th year, Bertone chose to reinterpret Jaguar for a modern age.
Bertone’s team, led by Adrian Griffiths and Mike Robinson crushed it.
“We did lot of research on Jaguar, not just Britishness, but also the animal. It's a very quiet animal, it arrives with silence. Not like a Ferrari, a horse that arrives with lots of noise and vibration, but a Jaguar just arrives. Wow! It just arrives in one powerful leap, in stealth - that's a fantastic characteristic.”
– Bertone B99 Chief Designer Adrian Griffiths, speaking to Nick Hull at Car Design News (2011)
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2011 Jaguar B99 exterior • via Bertone
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2011 Jaguar B99 interior — note its distinctively clean, warm, and streamlined use of wood. • via Bertone
Debuting at the 2011 Geneva Motor Show, not only did Bertone first outline its plan for a svelte hybrid sedan at the approximate size of a BMW 3-Series, but presented it next alongside the topic at hand: a racing version.
A version that, if it had been built, would have been one of the world’s most advanced competition cars for its class…if, that is, all-wheel-drive hybrids had a place to race back in 2011-2012. (Bertone claimed it was intended for “GT2” but we’ll never know, as the closest class at that time was ‘LM GTE’, which forbid all-wheel-drive.)
If the wings ‘n’ things put you off, consider the much later Alfa Romeo Giulia GTAm, any of the radical Black Series Mercedes-AMG models, or the countless tuner versions of Porsche’s Panamera — the Jaguar B99, if built, would have waded into the ring against similarly Alcantara-shod competition.
The B99 GT still is, in a way, the future.
Thing is, the B99 would’ve had a time of it, as its envisioned hybrid powertrain had more in common with the Chevrolet Volt’s — if the range-extending engine was replaced with the 1.4-liter MultiAir turbocharged one, best known from cars like the Dodge Dart.
Oh, also the Fiat 500 Abarth.*
Bertone claimed that together, its two rear electric motors and engine (no word on a driveshaft or how exactly it all worked) would combine to equal 570 bhp in the standard four-door B99 road car.
Two of those doors were rear-hinged, by the way.
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With a profile evoking the (yeah, I’ll admit lovely) Jaguar XJ-C, both variants of the B99 have the gentle curves of a big cat lying in wait, with the GT version’s more compact 2-door cabin subtracting the perfect amount of negative space to accentuate the car’s muscle.
The finished B99 GT was a full-scale model, so Bertone’s claims of an additional pair of front electric motors for a total of 972 bhp should be disregarded as pure fiction.
Well-written, but fiction nonetheless.
What isn’t fiction is this: Bertone had three months to complete the project, and the B99’s Chief Designer Adrian Griffiths had the full-sized clay model finished in a week.
Story continues below…
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