This isn’t your ordinary, everyday station wagon.

As much as we love wagons, we love hotted-up wagons even more—there’s just something intoxicating about a powerful sports sedan with an enlarged cargo-swallowing space grafted to its rump. Take, for instance, Jaguar’s 2015 XFR-S Sportbrake: The package starts with the beastly 2014 XFR-S sedan, but drops that car’s trunklid and skyscraper wing in favor of a curvaceous cargo area topped with a small spoiler. A reasonable argument could be made that Sportbrake’s lines appear more natural, and they lend the car a certain grace to balance out its brash specifications. That the configuration offers an additional 1.9 inches of headroom for rear-seat passengers and an ample storage shed for the pink slips of the vanquished are just bonuses.

Weight Management

As an estate, provisions must be made to manage extra mass at the rear of the car. Jaguar specifically tuned the active rear suspension for the task, recalibrating the continuously variable dampers and springs to deal with the Sportbrake’s unique weight distribution. The rear brakes were tweaked, the rear axle modified, and the anti-roll bars swapped to ensure the Sportbrake offers the same handling as the XFR-S sedan. Twenty-inch Varuna wheels wear specially developed Pirelli tires sized 265/35 in front and 295/30 in the rear. The wheels come standard in a two-toned finish, but can be ordered in gray or gloss black finishes. The electronic programs that control the car’s Adaptive Dynamics chassis settings, the active electronic differential, and the stability-control system have been reprogrammed to work with the uprated suspension components and wheels.