It’s strongly rumoured that JLR sees BMW as a suitor to provide eight-cylinder motors in some of the group’s more potent future products... it’s anticipated this could make JLR’s decision to take engines from BMW all the easier, with the German marque’s 4.4-litre V8 being lined up for next year’s F-Type.

The most powerful version of that engine features in the BMW M8 Competition, where it produces 616bhp and 750Nm of torque. Should the new F-Type have access to this unit, it’ll provide a respective increase of 49bhp and 70Nm over the current most powerful model. Sharing engines with BMW would make a lot of sense, as the two automakers have already teamed up over producing electric cars. It’s also an idea we visited once before at the end of 2018, calling this whole thing a proxy war because then you’d get Astons with AMG engines and Jaguars with BMW engines. I’m no enemy of the BMW V8, I just don’t find them very exciting. They’re very powerful, sure, but they don’t sound particularly good and they’re all turbocharged. The V8 F-Type currently has one of my favorite engines on the market, which is a supercharged, crackly V8. BMW doesn’t make a supercharged anything. Fools.