I live in Austin and I'm getting tired of crawling back and forth to work in traffic in my XF SC so I'm looking for a good day-or-less-trip kind of drive that would have good opportunities to take some advantage of the car's performance.

Does anyone have any recommendations?

 

I'd say either northeast to the Lake Palestine area or northwest toward Lubbock and the New Mexico border. Both drives are scenic and relatively light on traffic as long as you avoid IH-35. 183 for the northwest trip and 79 for the northeast trip have done well for me.

Be careful in Williamson and Hays counties (especially Hays). Any nice car is a ticket magnet in those counties. I picked up tickets in my Lexus there when the same speed or faster only got me a stern talking to in Travis county.

I'm sure you've already heard about the speed traps in San Marcos and Selma as well.

 

Thanks for the tips. I've done drive towards Lubbock lots of times because I'm originally from Midland, but I hadn't thought about the drive towards Lake Palestine, I haven't gone that way in years.

There have to be some good drives out into the hill country, too. I may have to just go exploring.

 

Hubby's Solstice club annually drives The Three Sisters out of Kerrville... FM 335, 336,337. Great for twisty fast driving, very technical, performance oriented. Popular with motorcycles too, so best done non-bike times of year.

 

The three sisters I hadn't heard of, so that's a great tip. Plus, looking up info led me to find this site, which is absolute paydirt. It's for motorcyclers but has a fantastic map of great roads to drive (not just in Texas) Hill Country, Texas - Great motorcycle roads

 

The Three Sisters drive is one of the best in Texas. From Austin you can enjoy getting there via 1431 to Marble Falls, Fredericksburg and Bandera. It will be an all day event but you can hit high speeds and enjoy the curves that your Jaguar was designed to handle. Lots of fun! Beware of motorcycles shooting the curves on the yellow line.