Hello everyone,
I left a meeting this morning and I pushed the button to turn on Sport mode. The light on the button didn’t come on. I pushed it on and off a few times. Light still didn’t illuminate.
Then I moved the gear selector to the left side. It didn’t make the transmission downshift. No matter what gear I put it in, it just operates like a regular automatic transmission. It will downshift if I press the throttle.
Any ideas?

 

It's possible that the shifter, cable, link to the transmission is a bit out of range - usually solved by adjusting a stretched cable. Or making an adjustment to the cable and trans linkage that's pretty much starting from scratch,,, from an "adjustment" point of view.

Personally, I didnt know that this sort of misadjustment would effect the sport mode button so - don't do anything yit... Wait for smarter more experienced folks to chime in.

Any gearbox fault stuff.
Restricted Performance stuff.
Any codes?

 

With the 6 speed the J side is all electronic there is no mechanical linkage. The J module just sends different messages to the transmission to select the gears. What the sport button does is cause the module to send the “sport” version of those same gear messages.

Do the gear indicators light up red when you move the leaver? Is the D red? Is D flashing?

 

I didn’t notice the lights. And, when I drove the car again, the problem disappeared.

 

It is a electronic module that has a communication function. Maybe it just needed to be rebooted (let’s hope).

 

It's possible the 2 bolts holding the shift cable to the side of the trans are loose (or missing!). Small (8mm hex heads).

 

This happened to me and I ended up having to replace the gearshift illumination module on my car as the PO somehow put a 5 speed unit in as opposed to the proper 6 speed. In researching why my sport mode would not function and why I could not manually override the gears I found that many others had the linear switch go bad. This switch is what electronically enables the shifts on the left side of the J-gate. Do a search on the "linear switch" and see if that might help. I suspect that is the case for you but there is a lot of information about other causes of your problem in the threads. I believe one person even had a wire that broke near the transmission control module that caused the problem but for most it was the linear switch.

Here is a decent thread and I am sure there are many others:

https://www.jaguarforums.com/forum/x...rt-mode-84688/

Good luck!