I Bought a CHEAP 400HP Supercharged V8 BEAST! *Super FAST*

Make sure you warm it up before you romp on it. Alright. Hey guys, I'm Sam Kraken. Check out my new used Jaguar S-Type-R. This car is basically a poor man's Hellcat. It's got a supercharged V8 engine, cat badges on it all over the place. And it's kind of big and bulky, just like a Hellcat. But unlike a Hellcat, it only cost me $3,900. And no, I didn't have to trailer it here or push it here. It made it under its own supercharged V8 power. Now I was able to find so much car for so little money by using autotempest.com. I first heard about autotempest.com when Tavarish bought the world's cheapest Toyota Supra. And again when he unveiled his latest project. What was that? Like a twin-turbo Volkswagen of some sort? Rough. I've always had an affinity for buying private party cars. Buying directly from an owner is a great way to feel out the true condition of a car and save a lot of money in the process. When I used to search for a car, I'd start at eBay, then move to my local Craigslist, then move to the next major city's Craigslist, but not anymore. Autotempest brings me search results from every major automotive marketplace all on one organized page. It even provides every matching Craigslist post within the vicinity you choose. Go ahead and click the link in the description box below or head over to autotempest.com. On my first search, Autotempest made it super easy to find the perfect Jaguar S-Type R for this build. Although admittedly, the condition of it is not quite perfect. It's pretty clear that this car spent most of its 14 years outside as the paint is fairly sun damaged all over and has its fair shares of nicks and dents. The check engine light is on pointing to a bad O2 sensor and also something wrong with the EGR valve. A few hundred dollar fix. And for me, the low point on this car is definitely its interior. It's not that the interior isn't that bad a condition. It's got normal wear for about 70,000 miles. However, it's the most boring color you could choose and it's unfortunate because the S-Type R came with a handful of really unique color options. The gray interior makes you feel more like you're in a mid-90s Taurus instead of a supercharged V8 Jaguar. Which kind of makes sense. Ford owned Jaguar during the production of this car and while many people frown upon the Ford-era Jags, it still was considered a status symbol and you don't have to take my word for it. All mentions of Jaguar in rap songs ceased following production of the X-Type. At first glance, this car doesn't look like anything special. It might be a car that one of your grandparents had. But the positives of this specific car greatly outweigh the negatives. For a 14-year-old car, it only has 70,000 miles on the odometer and living in Florida its entire life, there's not a stitch or rust anywhere. The 400 horsepower supercharged V8 is mated to a six-speed automatic ZF gearbox. And that's notable because most automatics of this era were either four or five speeds. So this right here is the J-Shifter. It works just like it looks. You've got your regular park, reverse, neutral, and drive here. If you want to bring it over into what would have been called Tiptronic mode in the mid-2000s, you got your second, third, fourth, and fifth gears here. This S, I believe, stands for sport. You press it and it's basically an overdrive off. Does nothing more than hold the gears longer. I think moving all this stuff over here is just a bit more added work that's completely unnecessary. So frankly, I'm not the biggest fan of the J-Shifter, although transmissions and manual modes have come a long way from the mid-2000s. So for the mid-2000s, I guess it's acceptable. Behind this great set of 18-inch wheels is a nice big brake setup. And of course, being an R, it's got an upgraded sports suspension. The key is like nothing I've ever seen before. It was kind of strange the first time I went to use it. I couldn't really figure out how to get it in there. Oh, there it is. Oh, yeah. Like any other good luxury brand, there's a hood ornament on this car. And it's got an interesting name, one that I never heard of until I researched it. Of course, Mercedes-Benz has their star. Rolls-Royce has their spirit of ecstasy. Bentley, the Flying B. This is dubbed the Leaping Growler. Are you serious? Leaping Growler? It sounds like a cut-rate hood ornament. I couldn't afford the spirit of ecstasy, so I settled for a Leaping Growler. At $3,900, that makes this Jaguar cheaper than a supercharger kit for a modern Mustang or Camaro. And on paper, it seems very impressive. And on the road, this kitty purrs. So there's still a pretty big market for this era BMW M5 and E55 AMG Mercedes, both of which have V8 engines. The Mercedes is also supercharged, although it puts out a little bit more horsepower than this car. But the thing about the BMW and the Mercedes is that they'll cost you more than three times the amount that this car costs me. And the spec sheets are so darn close together. What you do get with the BMW and Mercedes, though, is a real sports sedan feel. And this is somewhere in between. It really feels like Jaguar kept this a luxury sedan first and a sports sedan second. And we know that a mid-2000s Jaguar just isn't up to par on luxury standards as BMW and Mercedes was at the same time. As far as performance goes, though, this thing is still super fast for its age. The noise this car makes is pretty incredible, too. I mean, listen to the blower whine. I used to have a Shelby GT500, and stock for stock, the blower whine out of this car is substantially louder than the Shelby's. So right now we have this S button pressed. We've got the J shifter in second. We've got the traction control turned off, and we got a red light. All right, we give it a good roll on the throttle. Now, when I bought this Jag, I completely overlooked the technical features, as I think most people buying a 14-year-old car would. So the navigation system is old and outdated. The gauges look like they came out of a mid-2000s Ford, really. They're super boring. And the materials are OK, but they're definitely not up to European standards. But as far as the performance aspect of this car goes, it delivers on about 90% of its paper statistics. There's just one thing keeping it from being truly amazing, and that's this right here, the six-speed automatic transmission. And more likely, it's not the transmission itself, but the way the transmission is controlled by the computer. As you might have noticed when we accelerated, this car short shifts out of first gear. On top of it, the J shifter doesn't allow you to put this car in first and hold it in first. It only starts with second, and it has a sports button for overdrive off. So as much as I just want to hammer it, it always starts out in second gear. And for a six-speed, that's last two gears are overdrive gears. It just limits you to anything but really straight-line performance, which again is somewhat limited because it short shifts early in the first couple gears. It just feels a little bit like, you will never get this, you will never get this, la la la la la. Even with these few caveats, this car is an amazing bargain for what it trades for on the second-hand market. But it would be an absolute steal if the software just worked as well as the hardware that it came with. Now I'm really not sure whether this is the cheapest Jaguar S-Type R that's ever sold in the country. I do know that this car is one of the cheapest ways for anybody out there to go and get 400 horsepower in a fairly capable package for under $4,000. I searched for a long while trying to find a handful of other cars, and they were nearly double the cost of this. And these cars are known to be fairly reliable, although the parts costs are slightly higher since it is a Jaguar. Now when I bought this car, I thought that maybe I'd turn it into a 500 horsepower car under $5,000. But the power level of it is pretty ample, and the way the transmission shifts, I just don't think any more power is going to do much more for it in the quarter-mile drag strip segment. So then I thought maybe you could turn into a drift car, and again that transmission really limits what this car is capable of. And so maybe it would be a good road course car. There's a lot of things that we together can do with this car, and that's what I want your help with. Let me know what you think we should do with the Jaguar in the comment section below. I know first thing I'm going to do is repair everything that is making that check engine light go off, and also get the paint completely redone, and clean up the interior. Make it look as new as possible. Maybe not like a $3,900 car, maybe more like a $7,900 car. And then it's really going to be up to you guys. I really appreciate you guys watching this video. If you enjoyed it, be sure to hit that like button. Thanks a lot for watching, and I will catch you very soon. And now the best part of this car, what's under the hood. The supercharged 4.2 liter V8 in hell. Apparently I need to fix that as well.