Modernised Rangey A low-mileage Classic reimagined for today

MODERN CLASSIC

Jimmy Whitmore is the kind of petrol head who loves anything on four wheels – just so long as it’s interesting. With a background in engineering and a thirst to be innovative, you won’t fi nd him doing pile-it-high rebuilds. That’s why his Range Rover Classic manages to be convincingly modern –while still retaining the no-nonsense vibe of the original

Words and pictures: Dan Fenn

Not long after Jimmy Whitmore fi nished building his 1986 Range Rover Classic, he drove it into his local town and parked up to go to the shops. As he was getting out, a young couple came walking past.

‘That’s nice,’ remarked the woman, gesturing at Jimmy’s truck.

‘Yes,’ said the man. ‘It must be the new Range Rover.’

Now, there is indeed a new Range Rover due out sometime in the next year. And perhaps the chap knew more than he seemed and thought it might be a cleverly disguised development mule. Or maybe he was just dazzled by the standard of the rebuild Jimmy’s done and, oblivious to what Range Rovers have become over the last couple of decades, thought it really was a new one.

Either way, it’s safe to Jimmy was pretty happy with what he heard. He didn’t rebuild his Rangey as an out-and-out off-roader, or an out-andout street machine, or an out-and-out concours classic, but as a nice old four-door made right and brought into the modern world.

There are people in this world who have learned how to make a living by restoring Land Rovers to a formula and putting huge tickets on them. Jimmy is not like that. Coming from a family with a seam of engineering brilliance running deep and wide through it, he combines enormous knowledge with a maverick spirit and, in particular, a heartfelt love of cars.

He’s got time for any vehicle with a bit of soul to it. Which of course means he’s mainly into older ones. When we visited his yard, on a farm near Exeter, we were greeted by a sight to stir the soul: classic Jaguars, Mercedes and a Rover P5 all in various stages of being brought back to life, a couple of Japanese 4x4s, a Volkswagen Caddy with a tremendouslycolourful history involving everything from winning a race against an F-Type SVR to being used as a makeshift bedsit… His current daily is a fi rst-generation Scirocco. In the workshop, the remnants of an old SL-Class Merc are being grafted on to a Mk4 Chevy Corvette. You get the idea.

‘I bought it in London. It had the hookiest MOT I had ever seen – I thought it was going to kill me numerous times on the drive back to Devon!’

‘I’m not so much into off-roading now,’ he says, ‘but it was a big part of my life growing up and as a younger adult. I like tuned classic Jaguars and burning off sausage wagons on the autobahn, or at least I did before the virus. I had epic times on enduro bikes, including a 1994 KTM LC4 Dakar 620 and a Yamaha XT600 called Wendy the Wonder Bike which I rode coast-to-coast in the US when I was 20 – a solo trip, all off-road or back roads, on the northern route through California, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota and so on. I’ve driven 4x4s all over Europe, especially Scandinavia, and the USA, and I also had a mental Baja Bug that spent a lot of time airborne in the Rocky Mountains!’

His story includes plenty of Land Rovers, too. Most of them capable of making a rivet-counter’s blood run cold. Most things Jimmy builds have a touch of the street fi ghter about them

Left: The engine is a 3.5 EFi with a little extra help from a K&N air filter and Piper mild road cam. That’s not all, though – it’s been fully rebuilt, with all the shells, bearings, rings, lifters, timing chain and so on replaced with OEM quality parts. All cast components were chemically cleaned, too, while the heads were also rebuilt and the timing case was replaced with a new unit. Further upgrades include a high-capacity oil pump and metal head gaskets Above: The LT77 gearbox has been completely rebuilt with new main, lay and primary shafts. The transfer box, meanwhile, which is what you’re looking at here, has been upgraded to a new chain-driven Borg-Warner unit with a viscous coupling

– that P5, for example, is going to go back together with the 4.6-litre V8 from a let’s-go-mental-era Rover 75 under its bonnet. And when he starts talking about the rear-wheel-drive, TVR-engined Series IIA he built for a friend who wanted something for destroying Porsches in London, you know you’re dealing with someone who’s in it for the love of driving.

That wasn’t the only one he reimagined, either. ‘I had a military 110 which I stripped and rebuilt with a custom rear crossmember and powder-coated chassis,’ he tells us. ‘It ran a Cumins 4BD1T tuned with large turbo and intercooler (300bhp and 610lbf.ft), Santana 5-speed gearbox, LT high-ratio transfer box and high-ratio Salisbury axles front and rear. It would do 115 at 3100rpm!

‘I drove it all over Europe and Scandinavia many times. But it ate gearboxes, so I moved away from Land Rovers and big power.’

What followed was a lengthy spell back in the worlds of classic restoration and hot-rod building. But you’re never recovered, only recovering, and so it proved when a temptingly low-mileage Range Rover came up for sale.

‘It’s got 43,600 original miles and three owners including me,’ says Jimmy. ‘It had spent most of its time hanging out in a hay barn, as the original owner did the gearbox output splines by towing a heavy horsebox around in high range.

‘I bought it from a copper in East London. It had the hookiest MOT on it I’d ever seen and I thought it was going to kill me numerous times on the drive back to Devon. It turned out he’d changed a number of parts like A-frame ball joints and radius arm bushes and had failed to do anything up more than finger tight…’

Time for a chassis-up rebuild, then. Not something you’d expect to be necessary at 43,600 miles, but that’s 35 years of abuse, neglect and

Above left: The front axle gained new kingpins and rebuilt swivel housings, seals and bearings. In addition to the steering guard, there’s a bolt-on diff guard to deflect impacts away from the delicate bits. The back axle, meanwhile, was entirely rebuilt in a brand new OME casing Above right: The Rangey’s suspension has been lifted, but not excessively. It’s on +25mm front and +50mm rear light-duty coils, combined with Gaz shock absorbers and Powerflex polyurethane bushes all round. While refurbishing the vehicle, Jimmy removed all the suspension components to be chemically cleaned and repainted prior to going back on Left: Underneath, the bolt-in crossmember beneath the gearbox has been replaced by a tubular military unit

Above: These days, steel bull bars on new vehicles are about as acceptable as reruns of Jim’ll Fix It on primetime TV. But back when the original Range Rover was still being built, a 4x4 was considered naked without one. Jim fabricated his own as part of a custom front bumper; there’s a stainless steering guard under there too, as well as a wonderfully retro touch in the shape of two original Lucas 20:20 driving lights Right (opposite page): The rear bumper was fabricated in a similar style to the front. There’s no bull bar this time, but the tail lights are tucked in behind a nifty set of protectors Left: Box-section rock sliders with lugs for a high-lift jack tell you that while this is a slickly revived Classic, it’s also a vehicle designed to be well and truly fi t for purpose

rubbish maintenance for you. The chassis itself has never been welded, so having been stripped right down it was shot-blasted and repainted to make it like new.

What you won’t see under the vehicle is a layer of wax. That’s because Jimmy has installed an unusual modifi cation he learned about while working on boats. A 5mm sacrifi cial plate is welded to the chassis with two M12 studs to mount a magnesium anode; copper cables run from this to the chassis, body, engine and battery earth terminal. ‘This stops electrolytic action happening where different metals make contact in the vehicle structure,’ he explains. ‘It also stops galvanic reaction happening on electrical contacts, which makes the vehicle’s electrical system reliable. This is the bet thing you can do to protect an aluminium-bodied vehicle against corrosion.’

The Range Rover’s body was in almost as good a condition, with no more than a bit of minor welding being needed behind the headlights and front inner arches. The panels were all stripped, with the old paint chemically removed, and fully etch-primed before being repainted. The colour, which you’re unlikely to recognise, is Dark Bronze Mist metallic – it’s from the Cadillac palette, and Jimmy chose it because he wanted something more modern that still didn’t look a million miles away from an original Range Rover hue.

Under the bonnet, the 3.5 EFI engine was fully rebuilt with all the cast components chemically cleaned. Jimmy used OEM-quality parts throughout – things like the shells, bearings, rings, lifters and timing chain – and added a Piper mild road cam, metal head gaskets and a K&N air fi lter to make it go nicely. Which it does – while also making a lovely noise. He describes it as sounding like ‘a baby TVR,’ which might seem to be the wrong way round but, when you consider the racket a Griffi th or Tuscan was capable of kicking

Chassis corrosion? Here’s the thinking man’s answer…

Nothing too aggressive here – but it’s not just classic-car road rubber, either. In fact, if you’re of the Boggers-or-bust persuasion you’d be agog at what a proper 4x4 and a skilled driver can achieve on a compromise tyre like the BFGoodrich All-Terrain

Every now and again, we come across something the likes of which we’ve not seen before. Not bimetallic corrosion on Land Rovers – we’ve DEFINITELY seen that before – but the use of a galvanic anode to prevent it.

These are common in the maritime industry, and as a way of protecting metal structures designed to be buried under the ground. They work by introducing a third kind of metal into the circuit, which needs to be more ready to give up its electrons than the existing two.

In this case, we have the mild steel of the Range Rover’s chassis and underbody and the aluminium of its panels. Welded to one of the main rails is a 5mm plate with a magnesium anode mounted to it via two M12 studs. Copper cables run from the anode to the chassis, body, engine and battery earth terminal.

‘This stops electrolytic action happening where different metals make contact in the vehicle structure,’ explains Jimmy. ‘It also stops a galvanic reaction from happening on the electrical contacts, which makes the vehicle’s electrical system reliable. This was my own idea – it’s the best thing you can do to protect an aluminium bodied vehicle against corrosion.’ thing you can do to protect an aluminium bodied vehicle against corrosion.’

Galvanic anodes are also known as sacrifi cial anodes, because it’s the material you’ve introduced into the circuit that does the corroding. This does mean they need to be replaced every now and again; the McDuff unit you see in the picture above, which is intended for use on inshore boats, costs about thirty quid to buy and in an application like this can be expected to last long enough between replacements to basically count as free rustproofi ng.

If you’re looking for upgrades, there’s not a lot to see here. The cabin is, simply, very original and in excellent condition. The wood trim on top of the fl oor console is non-standard, as are the matching turned gear knobs; whether you like them is very much down to personal taste (the original timber on the doors is rather more muted, certainly), but one thing surely nobody’s going to argue with is the sound system, which has been upgraded to one from this side of the millennium

up, is actually quite accurate. It’s restrained but not muted, rude but not obscene.

This points up the importance of relatively small things in getting the best from an engine. It’s easier to count up the number of people who’ve not done a K&N, but the metal gaskets are less of a well known way to get more power from your engine. Similarly, Jimmy has installed Sumo steering bars – not because he intends to go off-roading in the sort of conditions that need ultra-strong components here, but because they help give the vehicle more feel on turn-in.

If you’re dismissing this in your mind as a load of old waffl e, we drove Jimmy’s vehicle and we can report that you’re wrong. The only Range Rover we’ve ever experienced that handled as sharply as this one was factory-built in the 1980s for a works entry into the Paris-Dakar Rally which, sadly, never came to fruition.

Has it occurred to you yet that you’ve never seen a Range Rover in this colour before? Well it has now… The panels were stripped and all the old paint chemically removed before they were fully etch primed and repainted in Cadillac Dark Bronze Mist – a metallic shade used around 20 years ago on the gone-and-almost-entirely-forgotten Seville STS

The LT77 gearbox was completely rebuilt, too, and the transfer case was upgraded to the later Borg-Warner chain-drive unit with a viscous coupling. Jimmy says this ‘dramatically improves roadholding and off road ability,’ and that along with the sacrifi cial anode it’s one of the best things he’s done on the vehicle.

Another is the use of castor-correction bushes on the suspension, which went on when the axles, brakes and so on were being built back up. So too did +25mm front and +50mm rear springs, Gaz shocks and a full polyurethane bush kit from Powerfl ex, giving the Range Rover a subtly tougher stance and tightening up its handling still further.

The result? A Range Rover which still looks acceptably original but is also somehow more modern in its appearance – and dramatically improved in the way it drives. It’s defi nitely cool, but it’s not a tart’s handbag the way some resto-mods can be, with an interior that’s largely original and none the worse for it. You could use this Rangey as a daily driver, a work truck or a toy, or as all three, and it would be in its element in each case.

And when we say you could do these things with it, that’s not just us speaking hypothetically. That’s because Jimmy, and his apprentice Calen, rebuild vehicles for more than just the fun of it. He might not be one of those people who make a living by restoring Land Rovers to a formula and putting huge tickets on them, but he does build vehicles to sell – sometimes to customers’ specifi cations, but mainly because the way he likes them seems to appeal to people who know what they’re looking at. Which means that for £45,000, this robustly rebuilt low-mileage Range Rover could be yours.

A lot of money? Well, for double that you could go to a company with a fancy website and get one with an interior that looks like Lady Gaga’s wardrobe. And paying less is defi nitely an option, though only if you go somewhere that’s either doing it at a loss or not putting in the sort of work this one’s seen. ‘I’d have made more money working with the slaves in the hand car wash,’ laughs Jimmy. ‘These things are a stupid amount of work and money to make good.’

So when this one has sold, he’ll go back to classic Mercs and Jags, then, will he? Well, yes, in as much as he’ll keep on doing what he does: ‘If you want something building which isn’t gash, I’ll make it,’ could win an award for the pithiest marketing slogan in the history of the car world.

But he’ll also keep on doing what he does in other ways, too. Future plans are almost too many to list, but here’s one: ‘Build a 110 with Dana axles, a Corvette C5 LS1 power plant and Allison air shift box. Much better!’ As we said, you’re never recovered, only recovering. Rivet-counters of the world, watch out…

If you like the look of this Range Rover, or you’ve got a project of your own that you’d like to talk about, Jimmy is on 07522 618509. Just don’t expect him to sell you it for sweeties… or indeed to build you anything, er, gash…