2009 Jaguar XFR - Jaguar Chassis Tuner Mike Cross - First Drive

Master Class: We ride with Jaguar's chassis guru, Mike Cross

If Jaguar vehicle integrity manager Mike Cross were any more relaxed, he'd be asleep. He slouches in the driver's seat, talking quietly, slow hands caressing the steering wheel. But appearances are deceptive. We're sprinting across the wriggling, heaving roads of northern Wales in the new Jaguar XFR, nipping apexes and dodging around rock walls, Cross's eyes laser-locked on the road ahead.

Cross is our kind of car guy: fast and neat on the road, race-quick on the track, and with the ability to make any rear-drive car corner in a lurid tire-smoking drift when he feels like it. Yet his cars are anything but the rock-hard, kidney-rattling rides you can sometimes get from enthusiast engineers. Here's why.

Jaguar has a lot of targets and metrics that enable engineers to get close to the right chassis setup straight out of the box. "But the final polish is still done subjectively," Cross says. And north Wales is his personal chassis-calibration laboratory. Only a couple hours west of Jaguar's engineering center at Whitley, the gnarly Welsh tarmac gives Cross all the feedback he needs to evaluate a vehicle. "If a car works well here," he says, "it generally works well everywhere."