Has anyone had any experience with a snapped Driveshaft (Driveline)? I’m on a VAP tune, upper pulley and intake on my XF. She has 75k miles on her, running Firestone Indy 500s in the rear. Decided to give her the beans at a red light and BOOM, loud clunking noise near the differential. Checked under the car and the driveshaft is hanging towards the end near the differential. Had it towed home, will post pics tomorrow. Let me know if anyone has had a similar experience, or if I should upgrade my driveshaft? Maybe to an aluminum driveshaft?

 

 

Unless there are signs of a pre-existing fault, which is not apparent from your photos, I'd think it is a case of too much torque for the component to handle. If your engine provides great gobs of power and your tyres provide great gobs of traction then everything in between is under great gobs of stress. Requirement for an upgrade is obvious but I wonder what will be the weakest link after that- ideally the weakest link becomes the inertia of the vehicle and everything else comes together to accelerate the thing at a suitably impressive rate but there's no guarantee that you can keep upping the power and torque without breaking something. The driveshaft is probably a lucky break as it'll be cheaper than replacing a diff or transmission.
Can I suggest a call to Tom Woods Custom Driveshafts- they are in Utah, world renowned specialists in custom shafts for offroad racing but would be able to put something together for you. Or of course there are probably plenty of performance driveshaft makers in California.

 

Thanks for the pics, this is definitely useful information, although it sucks it happened to you.

I'm in the process of rebuilding a spare 6HP28 Supercharged transmission with an Exedy clutch kit and investigating other upgrades within that, but I've often wondered about the capability of the driveshaft. That said, a new replacement from Jaguar is $1500-1800 and I'm pretty sure you could have a much stronger one made to fit for the same sort of money if not cheaper.

The next weak link would be the halfshafts (I've certainly read about these snapping) and I'm sure again stronger replacements can be made for the same price that JLR want for replacements but honestly I don't know how much that rear diff can take, and when you start getting into custom diff upgrades that stuff gets expensive.

One place I feel the diff can be improved for not much money is cooling, and I'm currently investigating that, including having a custom water-cooled sleeve made for the e-diff motor, with a similar sort of cooling setup as the PC builders or the RC lot use.

 

This is the first we have seen? Is your car modified?
I ask because we have a large group between the XF, XJ and F -Type owners who have all tuned and put pulleys on with no breakage.
Hope it's a one off too!

Have you considered a CF drive shaft?
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Wow that's impressive torque

 

And XK's

I do feel like I am living on borrowed time though each time I line up on the drag strip!