4x4 Magazine - February 2022 (Land Rover Special) by Assignment Media Ltd

4x4

NEWS • TECH • DEBATE • TRAVEL • MODIFIED VEHICLES • GREEN LANING PLUS It’s not all Land Rovers; THIS is the latest thing from Lexus!

THE UK’S ONLY 4X4 AND PICK-UP MAGAZINE

LAND ROVER SPECIAL

Featuring the base-spec Defender 90 – on the best green lanes in all of England

PLUS Masai’s unique Defender accessories go together to create a very special 110 DC

Series IIA Dormobile – Land Rover’s factoryapproved turn-key expedition vehicle from back in the day

Disco 4s take the off-road route coast-to-coast across the USA

£4.99

The story of this ultra-rare bobtailed P38A Range Rover

FEB 2022

Ex-Army 90 gets anything but a quiet retirement 4x4 Cover Feb 22.indd 1

17/01/2022 17:32

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19785 Allmakes Ltd 4x4 Magazine - 3 page advert - Discovery.indd 1

21/08/2020 10:39

The World’s best accessories for Land Rover Discovery

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19785 Allmakes Ltd 4x4 Magazine - 3 page advert - Discovery.indd 2

21/08/2020 10:39

Terrafirma accessories are available from over 100 distributors worldwide Wheels, Brakes and Drivetrain

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19785 Allmakes Ltd 4x4 Magazine - 3 page advert - Discovery.indd 3

21/08/2020 10:43

EGR ROLLTRAC.

INTRODUCING THE WORLD’S BEST ELECTRIC ROLL TOP COVER.

EGR RollTrac is the all new roll top cover that keeps cargo fully protected, wherever your pickup truck is heading. Just the job for even the toughest of rides, it boasts a lightly textured black powder coating that’s water and scratch resistant to boot.

And if security’s top of mind, the EGR RollTrac simply won’t disappoint. With an aluminium interlocking slat system, it’s impossible to cut through, or pull apart.

Find out more and buy online at www.4x4ni.com 30 | AUGUST 2020 Ad spreads.indd 30

What’s more, the EGR RollTrac is fully integrated into your vehicle’s electrical system. No hassle. It opens or locks shut with just the click of your key fob.

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4x4 30/06/2020 17:05

Available exclusively from

SMART TECH • SECURE • WATER-RESISTANT • TOUGH • CENTRAL LOCKING

4x4 Ad spreads.indd 31

AUGUST 2020 | 13

30/06/2020 17:05

February 2022

CONTENTS

‘MOD Land Rovers have a thicker chassis and better are half the battle to work with as the military look

4 | FEBRUARY 2022

AWAITING SUBS INFO Contents Feb.indd 4

4x4 17/01/2022 22:28

54 COOL TOOLS WHEN YOU SUBSCRIBE!

Right now you can get 4x4 delivered for a year for just £30 – and we’ll sweeten the deal by sending you a high-quality Sealey multi-tool worth £21.54! 4x4 Scene: News, Products and More… 8 10 12 14 14 16 20 20 22 24 26 26 28 29 29

Range Rover Kingsley Cars unveils ULEZ-busting rebuilt Classics Dacia Duster ‘Mud-Wash’ stunt reveals a telling truth about SUV owners Lexus Hydrogen-powered off-road buggy is, sadly, no more than a concept Snape Rake Lane Lancashire laners go to work to repair vandals’ damage The Wayfarer Repairs begin at long last on iconic Welsh right of way Odyssey Challenge Fancy dress, proposals and more to wrap up the season TeraFlex 2.5” suspension kit for JL Wranger now in stock at Jeepey Osram Wide range of LED lighting solutions for every kind of 4x4 Ruskin Design Bespoke interiors the last word in creativity for your truck Toyota Land Cruiser Heritage parts for 40-Series joins oﬃcial range BFGoodrich Third-generation Mud-Terrain remains an off-road legend Britpart Replacement squabs for Land Rovers’ centre seats Masai 4x4 Trim shop makes almost anything a Defender fan could ask for Britpart 3” wide-bore tailpipe makes for a hardcore 110 Roamerdrive Transfer case dipstick for Series Land Rovers

Driven 30

Defender 90 Base-spec coiler takes on some of Yorkshire’s best green lanes

Every Month 6 62 80

Alan Kidd Why are there so many Land Rovers in this issue? Subscribe Get 4x4 for almost half price – and get a free lamp from Ring too! Next Month The return of everything that’s not a Land Rover…

Features 38 42 46 50 56

Reborn Series I An old trialler lives again as an ultra-cool street machine Sleeper Service The restoration of a classic Series IIA 109” Dormobile Hardcore ex-MOD 90 Army wagon turned into a serious off-road weapon Bobtailed P38 Mk2 Rangey loses its back end… and gains a proper diesel Classy 110 Retrimmed with style by the team at Masai 4x4

Travel 60

Expedition America Coast-to-coast epic on almost nothing but unmade trails

Our 4x4s 72

bulkheads. And they after them’

Reworked by Ruskin Our old 90 is transformed by the interior specialists

4x4 AWAITING SUBS INFO Contents Feb.indd 5

FEBRUARY 2022 | 5

17/01/2022 22:28

4x4 Tel: 01283 553243 Email: enquiries@assignment-media.co.uk

Alan Kidd Editor

In Britain, I was told, if you do off-roading, you do Land Rovers

ver since I became the launch editor of Total Off Road magazine back in 2002, something I’ve enjoyed hearing is people telling me they like it because it’s a bit different to the usual procession of nothing but Land Rovers. So I’m braced for a bit of criticism from a few of you about this issue… because it’s a procession of nothing but Land Rovers. Why are we doing such a thing, you might reasonably ask. For an answer, I’ll take you back to a comment one of my mentors made back in about 1995. I had started doing a bit of trialling in a more or less standard 88” Series IIA, and I had quickly discovered that part and parcel of the sport was getting beaten out of sight by Suzuki SJs. Perhaps we should launch a Suzuki magazine, I suggested. His response was simple: ‘In Britain, it’s still the case that if you do off-roading, you do Land Rovers.’ Perhaps that has changed a little. Today, there’s a healthy business in prepping new Wranglers and Rangers for tag-along laning tours and organised holidays, and there’s a few people who manage to live their lives in the 4x4 world without ever straying beyond the borders of Japan. But back then, almost nobody was doing it in shinies and though there were a noble few who stood ﬁrm against the Solihull tide, they were very much a maverick fringe. Anyway. It still is very much the case that about 95% of the time, if you do offroading in Britain, you do it in Land Rovers. That’s why they have an entire newspaper dedicated to them, and why the majority of 4x4 clubs are limited to Land Rovers only. Even when they’re not, Solihull motors are almost always dominant (in numbers at least, he said guardedly). For example, I joined up with a local all-marques 4x4 club a few years back to do a story on one of its laning days. All-marques… of the ten vehicles in the convoys, there were nine Land Rovers and a lone Mitsubishi Pajero. Again, a couple of years or so back I went out with Bonkas 4x4 on one of its lane trips. This is a famously diverse club, with all sorts of vehicles represented: again, there were ten in the convoys, though this

6 | FEBRUARY 2022

PAGE NUMBER Edline Mar.indd 4

time Land Rover only accounted for a measly seven of them. Me, I love all sorts of 4x4s. I don’t judge. Though even as I type those words, I’m thinking back on the various off-roaders I’ve owned in my life: 90, 110, 90, Range Rover, Cherokee, Patrol, Discovery, Landcruiser, 90. Bit of a recurring theme, isn’t there? What this all points to is the fact that love them or hate them, Land Rovers are still the heart and soul of the 4x4 scene. If you’re going overlanding, it’s still most likely to be in a 110. For a cheap playday hack, it’s most likely to be an old Disco. And if you’re after an off-road weapon that’ll also be your daily drive, you’re most likely to go for a Defender 90 or Discovery 3/4. And that is why this issue of 4x4 is a Land Rover special. It’s why, much as we’d like to, a Jimny special or a Jeep special wouldn’t work. The vehicles warrant it, but it would never appeal to enough readers or advertisers to make any kind of sense. Interestingly, though, if I go back to the last but one paragraph there’s another group of people I didn’t mention. What if you’re after a brand new 4x4 for work and/ or play? Do you buy a new Defender? No. You might look at the price but when you see the Wrangler or Landcruiser you’d get for the same money, you might also shrink away. And if you’re a utility company, you’ve already ordered a fleet of Rangers, D-Maxes or Hiluxes. Yet the new Defender has just retained its 4x4 of the Year title, and the road test in this issue reflects glowingly upon it. Which just goes to show that Land Rover is still making great vehicles. The Landy scene is rooted firmly in history, but even if people see them more as SUVs the company’s products continue to fly the flag. And that’s one reason why the advice I was given all those years ago still rings true. The vehicles might have changed, but everything else remains on the fringe. In Britain, still, if you do off-roading, most of the time you do Land Rovers.

Web: www.totaloffroad.co.uk www.4x4i.com Online Shop: www.toronline.co.uk Facebook: www.facebook.com/totaloffroad www.facebook.com/4x4Mag Editor Alan Kidd Art Editor Samantha D’Souza Contributors Mike Trott, Pip Evans, Dan Fenn, Paul Looe, Gary Noskill, Kaziyoshi Sasazaki, Olly Sack, Tom Alderney Photographers Tomasz Jarecki, Harry Hamm, Steve Taylor, Richard Hair, Vic Peel Group Advertising Manager Ian Argent Tel: 01283 553242 Advertising Manager Colin Ashworth Tel: 01283 553244 Advertising Production Sarah Moss Tel: 01283 553242 Subscriptions Sarah Moss Tel: 01283 553242 Publisher and Head of Marketing Sarah Moss Email: sarah.moss@assignment-media.co.uk To subscribe to 4x4, or renew a subscription, call 01283 553242. Prices for 12 issues: UK £42 (24 issues £76); Europe Airmail/ROW Surface £54; ROW Airmail £78 Distributed by Marketforce; www.marketforce.co.uk Every effort is made to ensure the contents of 4x4 are accurate, but Assignment Media accepts no responsibility for errors or omissions nor the consequences of actions made as a result of these. When responding to any advert in 4x4, you should make appropriate enquiries before sending money or entering into a contract. The publishers take reasonable care to ensure advertisers’ probity, but will not be liable for loss or damage incurred from responding to adverts Where a photo credit includes the note ‘CC BY 2.0’ or similar, the image is made available under that Creative Commons licence: details at www.creativecommons.org 4x4 is published by Assignment Media Ltd, Repton House 1.08, Bretby Business Park, Ashby Road, Bretby, Derbyshire DE15 0YZ

4x4 17/01/2022 17:53

Side Protection DA7533

DA7534

Rock Slider/Side Steps DA7533 Discovery 3 & Discovery 4 The best of both worlds with these fitted to your Discovery! Rock Slider - an essential purchase for any off road use. They prevent damage to the underside sill of the vehicle and allow for safe passage over rocky and rough terrain. Side Steps - users often fit side steps to enable easy access to and from the car - this is a problem when going off-road as they bend, break and cause snagging. These heavy-duty side steps are made from 5mm steel plate with 50mm tube backed up by an additional 2 x 40mm tube supports. The joints are TiG welded for a smooth finish. Supplied as a pair.

Rock Sliders DA7534 Aluminium finish DA7534B Black finish Discovery 3 & Discovery 4 Discovery 3 & Discovery 4 These rock sliders (sill protectors) are manufactured from 6mm 5083 aluminium and come completely machined and drilled ready to fit. An essential purchase for any off-road use as they prevent damage to the underside sill of the vehicle and allow for safe passage over rocky and rough terrain. Attaches to your vehicle using 11 mounting points on the side and underneath and when the car doors are closed they are almost unseen, but you have the piece of mind that your car sills are safe from damage. These units require no additional drilling just unscrewing and unclipping of the plastic OEM parts. For more information & images of these rock sliders visit www.britpart.com/rock

DA1308 DA1307

DA1308T

DA1312T

DA1307T DA1311T

DA1313T

DA1312 DA1311

DA1313

Direct fit! No Cutting! Great protection for the side of your Land Rover and they replace the sill of your vehicle. These rock & tree sliders are a fully welded 3mm steel construction with heavy-duty chassis mounted brackets and zinc primed with a smart black powder coated finish. Rock Sliders DA1307 Defender 90 - 1983 onwards DA1308 Defender 110 - 1984 onwards DA1311 Discovery 1 - 3-door DA1312 Discovery 1 - 5-door DA1313 Discovery 2

Rock & Tree Sliders DA1307T Defender 90 DA1308T Defender 110 DA1311T Discovery 1 - 3-door DA1312T Discovery 1 - 5-door DA1313T Discovery 2

www.britpart.com Find your nearest stockist - www.britpart.com/stockist

NEW 4X4S

Original Range Rover lives again

Kingsley Cars offers pre-1982 vehicles remanufactured to modern standards • Choice

ast year, the City of London expanded its Ultra Low Emissions Zone – a move which, while done with the best of intentions, has had the effect of making many thousands of per-

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fectly viable older vehicles unusable. For the majority of people driving high-turnover cars with a service life of less than a decade, ULEZ rules have little meaning. However for a signiﬁcant minority whose vehicles

were built to last, the fast pace of progress in emissions-reduction technology means they face punitive charges every time they get aboard. Of course, a disproportionately large number of vehicles falling into this trap are 4x4s. But for vehicles that were really built to last, there is a lifeline. The rules governing the zone apply, on a rolling basis, to all vehicles ﬁrst registered within the last 40 years – however those dating from before that are regarded as classic cars This means they are exempt from ULEZ charges – as of course they also are from road tax. Should you be minded to take advantage of it, they also escape the need for an annual MOT test. To take advantage of this, Range Rover specialist Kingsley Cars has launched a new series of reborn vehicles. These are Range Rovers registered before the 40-year cut-off date – which the company com-

prehensively remanufactures to a standard which is both premium and very contemporary. At present, the donor vehicles need to date from before early 1982 to qualify. Of course, this is constantly changing, however it means that for several years to come, they will have started life with a 3.5-litre V8. Given that the purpose of the Ultra Low Emissions Zone is to reward vehicles with smaller engines, then, savour the irony of Kingsley’s engine options for the vehicle: a choice of later 4.0 or 4.6-litre V8s. These are tuned for 220bhp and 270bhp respectively – by no means the extremes to which a Rover V8 can be taken, but enough to give the original Range Rover a pleasing sense of purpose. Even the Vogue LSE, with its 4.2-litre version of the same engine, only offered 203bhp when it was launched in 1992. Safe to say this is not what the capital’s powers that be had in mind

4x4 17/01/2022 16:54

NEW 4X4S

as ULEZ-busting reborn classic

of 4.0 and 4.6-litre V8s • Future-proofed engineering • On sale now starting at £125,000

when they drew up a strategy for cleaner air in the city. But by helping provide an incentive to keep older vehicles on the road, along with the energy locked up in their manufacture, they may have unwittingly built an additional beneﬁt into the new rules – one which it took Kingsley Cars to discover. The company is well known for the lengths it goes to when rebuilding the Range Rovers it sells, and these new models are no different. Available in two and four-door form, each vehicle is stripped to a bare shell, repaired as necessary and seamlessly welded for built-in protection against rusting. To make this last as long as possible, they’re then protected with seam sealer and a rubberised coating before being ﬁnished with high quality solvent paints. A three-year guarantee against corrosion is proof of Kingsley’s faith in what it’s doing here. To address what the company sees as another weak point on the Range Rover, its engine and drivetrain is replaced with the aforementioned choice of later Rover V8 engines mated to a ZF 4HP22 automatic gearbox and fully rebuilt Borg Warner transfer case. The

rebuilt vehicle is speciﬁed to modern standards of reﬁnement and can be ordered with a variety of high-tech additions including a reversing camera, front and rear proximity sensors, cruise control and iPad-based entertainment for rear-seat passengers. Before you get to that, base prices for Kingsley’s Range Rovers start at £125,000. That’s about £30,000 more than the new model, which may sound optimistic – but ten years from now, only one of them

can be expected still to be worth anything more than about ten grand. Further options in the cabin include ambient lighting, smartphone integration, wireless charging and a 700-Watt DAB stereo. The seats come heated as standard and you can have them trimmed in a wide variety of fabric and leather ﬁnishes. Should your idea of the perfect Range Rover include more visceral matters, Kingsley also offers its Fast Road Suspension Kit and Big Brake Kit, the latter adding six-pot front and four-pot rear calipers as well as larger discs while allowing you to retain the classic look of a 16” wheel. Forged aluminium wheels are available on the options list, too. ‘It was crucial to come up with a way to not only continue to restore

classic Range Rovers and Land Rovers but to enhance them for modern use,’ comments Kingsley Cars founder Damon Oorloff. ‘And so, our classic Range Rover Reborn series was created. Designed for fans and enthusiasts of the classic model, it ensures that when driving in London, road users will not be hit by the ULEZ charge. ‘It’s so important for businesses like ours to keep classic cars on the roads. As a team, we want to establish our vehicles as the alternative to modern Range Rovers and SUVs by offering our customers modern technology that ﬁts seamlessly into their everyday lives and enhances the usability of our cars, while retaining the vintage look and charm that comes with owning a classic.’

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17/01/2022 16:54

NEW 4X4S

Dacia’s Mud Wash stunt highlights number of urban 4x4s whose owners would like to use them for proper adventures WE’VE ALL HEARD THE ONE about spray-on mud. But Dacia has gone one further with a rather unusual new service – the ’mud wash.’ Maker of the Duster, our reigning Small SUV of the Year, Dacia says this is the first of its kind in the world. We’re inclined to believe them. The service was offered for one day only at the company’s London West showroom, where an ‘anti-clean team’ liberally applied mud to the lower body and wheelarches of customers’ vehicles. ‘The result?’ says Dacia. ‘Immediate bragging rights as friends ask what you have been doing over the weekend!’ While this was clearly nothing more than a goodhumoured publicity stunt, it makes a valid point. Dacia commissioned research which found that 40% of urban 4x4 owners have never taken their vehicles off-road – a figure which surprises us only in that we’d say it should be closer to 99%. Worse, though, 17% said they wished they could be more adventurous with their 4x4s. A clear indication that a huge number of SUV owners simply don’t know how easy it is to have those adventures – in many cases, surprisingly close to cities, with large networks of eminently usable public rights of way within an hour’s drive of London, Bristol, Leicester, Sheffield, Newcastle, Manchester and Birmingham. Dacia’s own ‘mucket list’ of 4x4 adventures includes things like going for a bike ride in Norwich or learning to surf in Cornwall, which suggests to us that it might have been dreamt up by someone whose knowledge of 4x4 adventures is yet to be located. Nonetheless, the point is a valid one. We were on a photoshoot in Yorkshire last year when we came across a family having a whale of a time exploring Rudland Rigg in a Duster, which perfectly illustrates that with a bit of gumption, your SUV can be the key to some proper adventures. Obviously, getting someone to wash it in mud is one option – but we’d recommend the real thing any time.

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15/12/2021 21:56:24

NEW 4X4S

Lexus plays off-road card with new NX-based concepts

traight from the thingsyou-didn’t-expect-to-seein-your-life vault comes a brace of off-road concept vehicles from, would you believe, Lexus. The Japanese luxury brand was early to the SUV party with the original RX300, and it was also the ﬁrst to bring hybrid propulsion to the 4x4 market, but it’s fair to say that its vehicles have only ever been seen as being at the tarmac-biased end of the terrain spectrum. With the introduction of the new NX, however, that might be set to change. Available in 350h hybrid and 450h+ plug-in form, this is related in some ways to the outstanding Toyota RAV4 PHEV – which has just swept to victory in the Medium SUV class of our 4x4 of the Year awards. As it to illustrate the credentials this gives it, Lexus unveiled the ROV and NX PHEV OFFROAD concepts at this month’s Tokyo Auto Salon – reimagining the NX as an overland raid wagon and then going one step further by turning it into something akin either to a side-by-side ATV or a Class 1 trialler. The NX PHEV OFFROAD is an NX 450H+ with lifted suspension and 265/65R17 BFGoodrich All-Terrain tyres on 12-spoke hard alloys. Up top, it gets an attention-grabbing tray-style rack mounted on a pair of transverse roof bars.

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The treatment is perhaps whimsical, but it illustrates how little it takes to turn a school-run SUV into a rugged looking weekend warrior. If nothing else, too, it’s a ﬁne indication of Lexus’ willingness to play the adventure card as it seeks to preset the new NX as more than just another medium SUV. That’s nothing, however, compared to the lengths to which the company has gone with the ROV. Styled using Lexus’ next-generation

design language, this is a recreational off-road buggy with all-round coilover suspension and a lightweight tubular body with the minimum of panel work. While the ROV is clearly a concept and nothing more, it seeks to point the way ahead by using a hydrogen-powered engine – the ﬁrst Lexus to do so. Hydrogen is typically thought of as a means of powering fuel cells, however more and more manufacturers are coming round to

the idea of using it for internal combustion – something which delivers the feeling of driving a traditional vehicle, in addition of course to the letting you enjoy a proper engine note. ‘Compressed hydrogen fuel is stored in a high-pressure tank and introduced into the engine using precise direct injection,’ explains Lexus. ‘The result is an environmentally eﬃcient engine that produces high-response torque from the hydrogen’s rapid combustion. It also maintains the stimulating feel of an engine-powered vehicle. ‘With engine oil consumption kept to a minimum, there are virtually no CO2 emissions when driving.’ Behind the hydrogen engine, which displaces 1.0 litre, a sequential gearbox is operated using paddle shifts. Two and fourwheel drive modes are available, with the latter aided by a locking diff, and traction comes from a set of Maxxis ATV tyres. The vehicle’s chances of being produced in showroom form are of course zero – though if it did, we don’t mind betting you’d soon see a few of them mixing it in comp safari circles.

4x4 17/01/2022 18:05

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02/08/2021 11:58

RIGHTS OF WAY

Best practice to the fore in Lancashire as rights of way users answer landowners’ call to protect unsurfaced road from damage

ights of way users often assume that landowners will be nothing but trouble. For responsible 4x4 drivers, however, the opposite is frequently the case. This was perfectly illustrated recently when members of the Northern Monkey 4x4 Club spent a day repairing Snape Rake Lane in Lancashire – and creating barriers to prevent irresponsible drivers from leaving the right of way to damage the adjoining woodland. The group’s leader Nathaniel Holloway, who is also the Lancashire Rep for the Green Lane Association, was contacted by the landowner and his wife, Mr and Mrs Fitzherbert-Brockholes, following previous maintenance days on which local 4x4 drivers have helped with repairs

to the lane. These repairs have held up well – however the landowners’ call came after the vandals had returned to destroy all the work that had been done to block access to the adjoining river bed. ‘Myself, my youngest lad Isaac, my assistant GLASS rep Ali Burgoyne, along with his son Morgan, and fellow Northern Monkey 4x4 club member Liam Greenwood had a productive day,’ Nathaniel reports. ‘We’ve blocked off the “off-piste” entry/exit where undesirables have been driving down the river and under the bridge instead of keeping to the legal route. We’ve shored up the banking and added defences preventing further access to the river upstream of the ford, and we’ve tidied up the boggy mess of wheel ruts.’

Keeping on top of the damage done by the criminality of this kind of 4x4 driver is a bit like painting the Forth Bridge. And when the vandals’ arrant selﬁshness is matched by the arch-opportunism of a certain kind of landowner, responsible users can be caught in the sort of downward spiral that has been the death of many much-loved lanes in Wales,

Derbyshire, Surrey and Yorkshire, among other parts of the country. With luck, however, the team’s efforts will yield long-term rewards. ‘We also now have wildlife cameras installed and I’ve got some signage coming in the post,’ says Nathanial. ‘So once it arrives, I’ll go back down and ﬁt them and hopefully ﬁnd our hard works paid off.’

Long-awaited repair work on The Wayfarer, one of the country’s longest and most beautiful lanes, is currently underway and, at the time of writing, due to be completed before the start of spring. The right of way, which runs between Llandrillo and Llanarmon Dyffryn Ceiriog in North Wales, is largely rocky and well surfaced, however a short section across boggy ground has fallen into disrepair after sleepers carrying the roadway become displaced. What should have been a relatively straightforward process has been seriously delayed due to a combination of lockdown restrictions and prolonged foot-dragging by one of the local authorities involved, and during this time a number of 4x4 drivers have made matters worse by ignoring requests for voluntary restraint. The right of way has now been formally closed, however, for the duration of the repair work – after which it should ﬁnally be open once again for all to savour.

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4x4 17/01/2022 17:33

We currently stock O.E. propshafts for many 4x4 models, but we are proud to have also spent time developing our own “Extreme” range. For the majority of 4x4 vehicles we can offer an upgraded propshaft option, whether you need greater angle, longer splines or larger torque capacity (which may give increased potential life-expectancy). Why choose “Extreme?” Wide Angle Operation - Double Cardan Joints - Heavy Duty Universal Joints Upgraded sliding assembly - Higher Torque Capacity - Heavy Duty Tubing

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4x4 4x4 4x4

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JUNE 2019 | 51

MOTORSPORT

Odyssey Batteries Winch Challenge concludes amid party atmosphere at Weekley Woods Words: Pip Evans Pictures: Tomasz Jarecki

he 2021 Odyssey Batteries Winch Challenge series reached its conclusion at one of its traditional venues, Weekley Woods near Kettering, after what was a rollercoaster year. It seems like a long time ago now, but when the season got underway last winter’s lockdown restrictions were still partially in

force – meaning the Viking 4x4 Club, like so many other organisers, had to take a huge gamble on being able to run events at all. For the ﬁrst three events of the season, no-one other than competitors, oﬃcials and marshals were allowed on site. In addition to this, everyone had to have a temperature test upon arrival

Sadly, the club’s gargantuan efforts to return to some form of normality were not rewarded by similarly sized turnouts, with the first four events of the season only attracting fields in the low double figures. The eternal problem of dates clashing with other challenge events had a big impact on this, but Round 5 saw much stronger numbers and by Round 6, a far healthier 25 vehicles lined up to take part. As has become traditional in the Odyssey Challenge, the final round of the year is run as a fancy dress fundraiser for charity. So everyone arrived in high spirits – though after five events which had all been blessed by good weather, things definitely weren’t helped by pouring rain and a howling gale. One big

gust actually broke the club gazebo from its tethers and it flew off into the trees, bowling some marshals over as it did so. Cue a scramble to recover it, with the driver’s briefing being held amid the chaos as marshals wrestled to regain control of the wildly flailing canvas. The rain did stop midway through the morning. But by then, the ground was sodden – meaning the conditions were extremely slippery. A notable feature of this event, in a sport which has always been male-dominated, was that with two drivers and four winch operators it had the biggest female contingent in the history of the Odyssey Challenge. The club was also delighted to welcome several newcomers to the winch challenge discipline.

4x4 3pp Scene Odyssey Feb 22.indd 16

17/01/2022 22:55

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MOTORSPORT

28/01/2020

17:31

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Most of these were in Class 1, which is the traditional starting point as it allows less traction aids – meaning it’s the cheapest entry point into the off-road game. For the same reason, however, it’s also the most technically diﬃcult class to be in, allowing as it does no more than just the one front winch. The result is that competitors really have to think about how to get to punches – and out again. Most people who come in to the sport and stick with it move quickly up to Class 2, where two winches are allowed – making it much easier to get yourself out of what you’ve just got into. Talking of winches, the greasy surface on this event meant that no matter how aggressive the tread pattern on your tyres, grip was at a premium. In terms of pressure on the vehicle, this means drivetrains get a much easier life – but that winches and their motors have to work a lot harder than they would on a dry event.

This is important because those who do well on a challenge event are generally those who manage to keep going. Which is easier said than done, because the extreme nature of the sport inevitably leads to breakdowns. It was particularly hard not to feel sorry in this respect for Zac Dambrauskas, who had been working long, hard hours on building a brand new truck. He finally managed to finish it the night before the event… only for it to break down with a fuel delivery issue before it got to the first punch. Kieran and Simon Robinett didn’t fare much better, only managing to collect three punches before having to retire. Amazingly, most of the others managed to do quite well. There were a few issues here and there, but most managed to fix them and carried on for the rest of the day. With this being a charity event, competitors had been briefed to return to the paddock area for an

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0203 542 0100 4x4 3pp Scene Odyssey Feb 22.indd 17

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MOTORSPORT

It’s become traditional in Odyssey Challenge circles for the final event of the season to be a fancy-dress fundraiser – and with around £2000 raised for mental health charity MIND, the exercise was very successful indeed. Proposals are not so traditional – in fact, this was the Odyssey’s first – but Will Baker pulled off a surprise at prizegiving time by dropping down on one knee and asking his team mate Georgie Smith (who, conveniently, is also his girlfriend) for her hand in marriage hour’s lunch break – or, more to the point, for the raffle draw and auction. There were loads of raffle prizes and auction items thanks to the generosity of several individuals and off-road companies who donated products to help raise money for mental health charity MIND. With around £2000 raised, the organisers’ efforts were very well rewarded. Back into the fray, the battle to find traction continued. The only terminal casualty was Dave Adams, who was going well having finally cured the fuel delivery issue that’s dogged him this season – only for

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3pp Scene Odyssey Feb 22.indd 18

his auto box gave up the ghost late in the day. Everyone else managed to keep going until the end of the event. With the four o’clock deadline approaching, a set of weary and very muddy competitors returned to base – and attention was turned to the goings-on in the gazebo (rems of) as the organisers crunched the numbers one last time. What these showed was that Henry Papworth and Paddy Burman had won the Toad School of Motoring award for the quickest time on the special section. Not a bad return for

a team that had to pack up at lunchtime due to family commitments – a small matter which didn’t stop them taking fourth place in Class 3. Third place in Class 3 went to Ben Mark and Chris Suttcliffe on 6140 points, with James Watts and Scott Haines breathing down their necks on 6464. Top spot in this class once again went to Matt Bain and David Burton, on 7840 points – a result which means they ﬁnish the title race with four ﬁrst places and two second – a brilliant year for them. In Class 2, third spot went to Richie Lott and Seb Parkes on 2870

points. Second were Matt Wothers and Paul Hitchman, on 4203, while top spot went to Johnny and Tracey Johnson with 6610 – the second highest score in the entire event. With an unusually high number of trucks in Class 1, the honours were hotly contested – and the final results were very close. Third place went to Matt Kimbley and Colin Worsley on 3198 points, with second going to Dave Adams and Tom Britten on 3508. Out in front, however, were Will Baker and his girlfriend Georgie Smith. The couple have worked well together all year, winning four of the five rounds in which they competed. They amassed 3928 points on their way to winning at Weekley Woods – but that wasn’t all! The Odyssey Batteries series has seen many firsts and extraordinary occurrences over the years, but the

4x4 17/01/2022 22:56

MOTORSPORT

SPECIALIST 4X4 VEHICLE DISMANTERS JEEP - LAND ROVER SPECIALIST 4X4 VEHICLE DISMANTERS AND MOST MAKES AND MODELS JEEP LAND ROVER QUALITY GUARANTEED USED PARTS AND MOST MAKES AND MODELS QUALITY GUARANTEED PARTS SOME OF THE VEHICLESUSED WE HAVE

ﬁnal gathering of 2021 will forever be remembered as one of the best. As they collected their trophies for winning Class 1, Will got down on one knee in front of all present and asked Georgie if she would marry him. For all the battle-hardened,

ROLL OF HONOUR The organisers of the Odyssey Batteries Winch Challenge are grateful to all who contributed to the raﬄe and auction which raised around £2000 for mental health charity MIND: • Goodwinch • Damar Webbing Solutions • Hybrid 4x4 • LOF clutches • LRS • Optimill • Maer • Gigglepin • Edd Cobley • Land Rover Experience • Full Flex Springs • Scott Haines • Llama 4x4 • KK mobile • Pip Evans • Sally Curling • Viking4x4 • Brian Elliott • Meat Matters/Team Muddle • Marrion 4x4 • Kelly Jones • Britpart • Team Danells • SS 4X4 • Kev Bates

4x4 3pp Scene Odyssey Feb 22.indd 19

ruffty-tuffty winch challenge competitors, there has never been such a lump-in-the-throat moment. And just in case you were wondering, she did indeed say yes! The 2021 Odyssey Batteries series could hardly have ended on a more triumphant note. But as we head into the close season, it’s set to be an interesting period in the history of the Viking 4x4 Club. Many of those who have been at the forefront of organising these events are well into their sixties and have opted to step down from active service – and in addition, club Chairman Duncan Smith is stepping down after ﬁve years in charge. So the onus is on the next generation – and after yet another successful season, they have big boots to ﬁll.

RECENTLY DISMANTLED: SOME OF THE VEHICLES WE HAVE RECENTLY DISMANTLED:

20012015 JEEPJEEP WRANGLER JK 2001 Jeep Grand CHEROKEE XJ 2.8CRD 2015 JEEP Cherokee WJ JK WRANGLER 2.8CRD

2007 DODGE 2018 JEEP NITRO 2.8CRD 2010 Isuzu RENEGADE 2007 DODGE Rodeo NITRO 2.8CRD

2016 RANGE 2008 NISSAN ROVER EVOQUE 2012 Range PATHFINDER 2.0 TD4 2016 RANGE Rover Sport ROVER EVOQUE 2.0 TD4

2014 RANGE 2016 2014 2010 JEEP 2006 JEEP 2011 ISUZU ISUZU ROVER SPORT 4.4 D-MAX 2.5 DIESEL CHEROKEE MK5 WRANGLER TJ RODEO MITSUBISHI L200 2010 2015 Mitsubishi KL 2.0 2020 Ford V8 Jeep DIESEL MULTIJET 2014 RANGE 2016 ISUZU 2014 JEEP Cherokee KK 4.4 D-MAX Outlander Ranger ROVER SPORT 2.5 DIESEL CHEROKEE MK5 KL 2.0 MULTIJET

V8 DIESEL

JEEP 2007 LAND 20152010 RANGE 2012ROVER CHEROKEE MK4 DISCOVERY 3 2.7 ROVER EVOQUE MITSUBISHI ASX 2015 Range Jeep KK 2.8JEEP CRD 20072016 TDV6 2010 LAND ROVER Rover Evoque Renegade CHEROKEE MK4 DISCOVERY 3 2.7 KK 2.8 CRD

TDV6

2008 HONDA 2013 TOYOTA CRV 2.2 CDTI HILUX 2006 Jeep Grand 2008 HONDA Cherokee CRV 2.2 CDTIWK

2006 NISSAN 2006 JEEP 2006 JEEP GRAND 2015 LAND 2004 JEEP CHEROKEE WK PATHFINDER 2.5 GRAND GRAND 5.7 V8 HEMI ROVER DCI 2020 Jeep Land2006 Rover NISSAN2015 Nissan 2006 JEEP2018 GRAND DISCOVERY CHEROKEE WK CHEROKEE WJ 2.5 X-Trail WK PATHFINDER WranglerCHEROKEE JL Discovery Sport Charlton Recycled Auto Parts DCI 5.7 V8 HEMI SPORT Vehicle Recycling Centre, Gravel Pit Hill, Thriplow, Cambridge, SG8 7HZParts Charlton Recycled Auto Tel 01223Gravel 832656Pit Hill, Thriplow, Vehicle Recycling Centre, Email parts@charltonautoparts.co.uk Cambridge, SG8 7HZ PLEASE VISIT WWW.CHARLTONAUTOPARTS.CO.UK Tel 01223 832656 Email parts@charltonautoparts.co.uk PLEASE VISIT WWW.CHARLTONAUTOPARTS.CO.UK

FEBRUARY 2022 | 19

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PRODUCTS

Jeepey adds TeraFlex 2.5” Sport ST2 suspension for current Jeep Wrangler JEEPEY OFFERS A WIDE RANGE of TeraFlex suspension systems for the Jeep Wrangler JL. Available for both 2 and 4-door model, the latest is a 2.5” lift kit promising true street and trail (ST) performance in a maintenance-free package. TeraFlex developed its ST systems for Jeep enthusiasts who need stable road manners to go with a comfortable and capable performance on trails and rough terrain. ‘The preset Sport Control Arms optimise steering geometry for improved highway handling,’ says the company, ‘and with the additional lift height over the Sport ST1 it clears larger diameter tyres without compromising on and off-road stability.’ Here’s what TeraFlex says you can expect from the new Sport ST2 kit: • 35” recommended tyre size, or up to 37” when using high-clearance wheelarches • Preset front lower Sport control arms balance front castor and pinion angles on 2.5” lift kits • Sport control arms are constructed from durable 42mm x 4mm wall DOM tube for max strength • High-quality, maintenance-free factory-style bushes for excellent vibration damping and ride quality • True street and trail performance • Dependable ‘zero-worries’ performance • Positive, responsive handling and reduced NVH

• Rear track bar axle bracket improves steering response, centres axles to optimise roll centre and reduces body roll for unsurpassed handling • Progressive bump stops protect occupants and vehicle from hard suspension bottoming • Front sway bar quick disconnects (2.5”+) for non-Rubicon models • Full range of movement for ﬂex and articulation • Bolt-on installation with no welding required • TeraFlex limited lifetime warranty against defects

jeepey.com. You can see them ﬁtted, too, along with examples of the many other modiﬁcations the company can undertake, at stormjeeps.com.

TeraFlex offers a range of Falcon dampers to use with its lift kits, from the entry level Falcon 1.1 to the Falcon SP2 3.3 – a piggyback shock offering a wide range of adjustability via an easy-touse 3-position fast adjust knob with soft, custom and firm settings. The ‘custom’ setting incorporates an 8-Position Dial for more precise tuning. ‘High-value performance is the driving force behind our vehicle-specific dampers for Jeeps, trucks and SUVs,’ says TeraFlex. ‘These Jeep-specific shock absorbers deliver increased stability, improved ride quality and comfort for daily-driven vehicles as well as race-inspired performance handling and stability for off-road rigs.’ The ST2 is one of a wide variety of TeraFlex kits available from Jeepey, all of which you can find at

JEEPEY HAS ALSO EXTENDED its line of genuine Mopar service items for the Jeep Renegades. New for 2022, the company’s Renegade Major Service kits are an ideal purchase when preparing for your next service; these are available for petrol and diesel engines alike. Each major service kit contains an oil filter, fuel filter, cabin filter and air filter. ‘Our Renegade offering doesn’t stop there,’ adds Jeepey. ‘We have a whole range of service items and accessories for both off-road and on-road adventures with your Renegade available to purchase online now.’ You’ll find them all at jeepey.com – while for workshop and build options, the place to go is stormjeeps.com.

LED products from Osram offer a whole lot of light for your money

he longest day might be behind us, but winter is still very much here. Which means gloomy days and long, dark nights. Which in turn means you have all the excuse you’ll ever need to ﬁt some (literally) shiny new LEDs. LEDs such as these little beauties from Osram, for example. Designed to help you see your way on pitch-black rural roads, dirt tracks and off-road terrain, they’re built to dish out maximum performance while also shrugging off the sort of

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knocks, scrapes and dirty dousings that come with the territory. First up, there’s the FX500-CB SM Lightbar. This 65cm unit provides an array of 20 highperformance LEDS whose 6000 Kelvin output and 5500 lumen flux provides what Osram describes as ’daylight conditions’ up to a distance of more than a quarter of a mile away. A useful feature is a reflector which diverts the LEDs’ beam away from oncoming traffic to prevent needlessly dazzling other road users.

With a choice of 12 and 24volt inputs, the FX500-CB SM is suitable for use with a wide range of vehicles in the utility, agricultural and off-road sectors. It’s designed with all the right failsafes to protect it from overheating or excess voltage, and its tough polycarbonate lens and IP67 protection promise a

robust approach to everyday abuse and environmental factors alike. The VX80-WD round LED light is sealed to IP67 too, and like the FX500 it has 12 and 24-volt input options allowing it to be used on everything from an everyday Land Rover to a combine harvester. It contains four LEDs, giving it a range of up to 240 metres. Once again, it delivers a hefty

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PRODUCTS

Storm Jeeps have a number of modified Jeep Wrangler JL Rubicon's for sale. More details on available stock via our website or call 01482 666491

6000-Kelvin performance for conditions similar to daylight. Here, a 1150-lumen power package promises the highest possible optical eﬃciency as well as even distribution of light. Like the FX500-CB SM, the unit was built for a 5000-hour lifespan. The VX80-WD is a high-value driving lamp carrying a pleasingly affordable RRP of £59.99 – a ﬁgure which sounds better value than ever when you consider that it comes with a two-year guarantee.

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The FX500-CB SM Lightbar, meanwhile, is priced at a rather more premium £349.99. That’s a

whole lot of light for your money, and this time it comes complete with a highly impressive ﬁve-year

guarantee. There’s a wealth of information about these, and a lot more besides, at www.osram.co.uk.

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PRODUCTS

Ruskin Design – giving your Defender an interior that’s as unique as you are

THERE WAS A TIME WHEN OWNING A DEFENDER meant putting up with a cabin that was functional at best. But these days, more and more Land Rover owners are using interior upgrades to help create trucks to be proud of. And when it comes to putting life into your Defender’s cabin, there’s not much that can beat a fully bespoke hand-crafted interior from Ruskin Design. The Leicestershire company is the international market leader in its field – and with its design-led service, it promises to create ‘an interior that is as individual as you are.’ With a highly skilled team of craftsmen and women, Ruskin has a reputation for outstanding creativity and first-class workmanship. Its ‘Ruskin Inside’ trademark stands for luxury and elegance, taken to a degree previous generations of Defender owners would never have dreamed possible. In the company’s own words: ‘Every component of a Ruskin Inside is hand-made, from replacement seat covers, roof linings and carpets through to door card, dashboard and gear shift covers. Whether you want denim or diamonds, vegan or vanilla, the materials for your Ruskin Inside will be skilfully sourced, precision cut, stitched and fitted by hand by our dedicated team, to give you a premium interior that is as unique as you are.’ Not many aftermarket additions have the potential to add to a vehicle’s resale value, but Ruskin customers often find that the company’s interiors make their trucks more desirable come sell-on time. Professional restorers offering bespoke cabin designs tend to trust them to the experts, too. Want to find out more? Pay a visit to ruskindesign.co.uk – and prepare to let your imagination run riot!

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PRODUCTS

Toyota adds 40-Series Land Cruiser to Heritage Parts range

oyota has introduced a new range of oﬃcial continuation parts for the 40-Series Land Cruiser. Sold under the banner of Toyota Gazoo Racing’s Heritage Parts Project, these were oﬃcially launched at January’s Tokyo Auto Salon – having initially been announced last August on the Landcruiser’s 70th birthday. The Heritage Parts Project reproduces discontinued items in collaboration with suppliers and sells them as genuine Toyota parts. Much of its business comes from the restoration industry inevitably – but Toyota says its aim is to support private customers who simply want to keep on driving vehicles they love and which have come to be more than just cars. ‘The Land Cruiser has long promised “to take people anywhere and everywhere and come back alive

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PRODUCTS

and safe,” says Toyota. Even models whose production has been discontinued for several decades continue to be cherished by large numbers of customers all over the world. ‘However, recent years have seen a shortage of spare parts, with Land Cruiser owners expressing fears they will no longer be able to drive their vehicles. ‘For this reason, Toyota Gazoo Racing has made the decision to

reproduce parts for which there is greatest demand and need, so that customers can continue to drive their cherished vehicles in safety and with peace of mind. The company has carried out preliminary surveys with exclusive Land Cruiser dealers and fan club representatives from across the globe and, as a result, it is advancing preparations to reproduce and sell parts related to the critical functions of driving,

turning and braking for the 40 Series Land Cruiser. These will be supplied as Heritage Parts and will include engines, drivelines and exhaust systems.’ Toyota says the project, which covers six different vehicles including the 2000GT and early Supra as

well as the 40-Series Cruiser, shows its commitment to car culture and supporting grass-roots motoring enthusiasts. The full range of Heritage Parts, which will be sold in the same way as genuine parts for current models, is being rolled out across its global dealer network now.

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PRODUCTS

BFGoodrich Mud-Terrain T/A KM3 – the third generation of a legendary off-road tyre MUD-TERRAINS COME AND MUD-TERRAINS GO, but for almost four decades BFGoodrich has been the name behind THE Mud-Terrain. The current Mud-Terrain T/A KM3 is the third-generation version of a tyre which has become a ‘Hoover’ brand in the world of off-roading – and BFG says it’s the best version ever. With the KM3, BFGoodrich says it has ‘introduced technologies that further improve climbing, traction and toughness in the mud and over rock.’ The company promises a five percent overall improvement in traction on soft ground compared to the old KM2, thanks to ‘mud-phobic’ bars on the tyre’s shoulders which aid self-cleaning by ejecting compacted material. They’re aided in this by the tyre’s ‘Terrain-Attack’ tread pattern, whose large blocks are designed to grip on to hard ground, or bite into softer surfaces, whatever the angle of approach. BFG says the tyre’s compound makes it eight percent more effective than the KM2 over rocks, with a ‘Linear Flex Zone’ designed to wrap around hard surfaces when running at low pressures. Performance over muddy and rocky surfaces alike is aided by notches in the tyre’s shoulders, which flow down into a ‘Traction-Armor Sidewall Sculpture’ whose reinforced structure helps prevent damage to the most vulnerable part of the carcase. The sidewalls themselves are now an astonishing 27% tougher than the previous model’s, thanks to BFG’s CoreGard Max technology – as used on its Baja T/A KR3 desert-racing tyres – which helps prevent splitting or puncturing, with increased thickness to protect the ‘critical sidewall failure zone.’ BFGoodrich says the KM3 ‘was designed to conquer the toughest off-road challenges with extreme sidewall protection, pinch shock resistance and chip-and-tear resistance on gravel.’ But just as importantly, it also offers ‘solid street performance and acceptable on-road noise levels for the drives to and from the trail.’ ‘The KM3 tyre is designed for extreme toughness and traction and is essential equipment for serious off-road enthusiasts,’ says BFG general manager Harold Phillips. ‘Whether simply driving for off-road fun, or the extreme capability to access outdoor activities, this tyre was made to take drivers anywhere they want to go.’ The KM3 is available globally in a vast range of sizes. Not every one of them is part of the British range, but that won’t stop a determined shopper – and at any rate, all the popular Land Rover fitments are represented here in the UK. You can find all you need to know about them by paying a visit to www.bfgoodrich.co.uk.

BRITPART OFFERS CENTRE SEAT SALVATION FOR THOSE LITTLE ACCIDENTS TACKLING TOUGH TERRAIN is nothing that’ll scare a Land Rover, nor indeed its seasoned owner. But sometimes we carry passengers, and sometimes those passengers aren’t expecting the fun they’re about to have. So let’s say you’ve given your mate a ride home from work, and you just happened to take the scenic route, and now here you are on the other side of some sort of death and hell terrain and he’s apologising for having spilt his coffee. Only he didn’t have a coffee. So he’ll say the brown stain on his seat must have been there already, and oh look, it’s gone and gotten on to his trousers too. Do you go in hard, knowing perfectly well what’s happened? Or do you act dumb, shrug, give him an easy ride… and maybe open your window a little? Neither. You keep a stiff upper lip, you pretend it never happened and you concentrate your mind on getting a new seat base. The exceptionally good news is that you won’t need to concentrate very hard, or for long. That’s because Britpart offers a central seat base for Series models. It has a deluxe County Grey covering and it won’t ever judge your mate. You could even pop over to www.britpart.com and pick one up in advance…

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Masai 4x4’s Interior Trim Shop promises to improve your Defender’s cabin in every way

MASAI 4X4 IS WELL KNOWN for its panoramic windows. But the company also has an Interior Trim Shop – whose range of products promises to transform your Land Rover’s cabin. These include signature highquality head lining and window interior trim products, both of which promise to let you restore your Defender to a better-than-new condition. And when it comes to seat covers, an area in which Landies are particularly good at getting dog-eared, Masai has a range available to suit every need.

its head linings, providing Defender owners with access to a consistent level of qauality in the upgrades it offers. Made from a high-quality premium suedette material and available in the same choice of ten colours as its head-linings, Masai’s internal window trim range ﬁts all Defender models built from 1985 all the way through to 2017.

SEAT COVERS Masai talks proudly of the craftspeople in its trim shop

whose skills have helped created a wide range of seat covers for the Defender. These allow owners to replace or upgrade originals which have become worn out, torn or scruffy – and of course they’re also ideal if you just fancy a change. The company’s range includes speciﬁc versions for the 110 and 90, covering 200 Tdi, 300 Tdi , TD5 and Puma TDCi models. Made from cruelty-free soft vinyl leatherette, these seat covers come complete with rear map pockets and, for additional

comfort, their own layer of foam covering. They’re available to be bought individually, as pairs or as a complete set. Additional options include covers for inward-facing seats and 60/40 split seats, as well as Deluxe and ‘Flute’ styles with piping. The covers come in a range of colour. To view the choices on offer, visit to www.masai4x4.com.

FITTING SERVICE If you like the look of what Masai has to offer but you don’t fancy the idea of fitting its products yourself, the good news is that the company can do it for you. You’ll need to travel to its base in Lichfield, just north of Birmingham, but once there you’ll find that its experts can do more or less anything in the way of fitting and restoration.

HEAD LININGS To avoid water absorption, Masai’s roof linings are made from GRP. This also gives a much greater degree of rigidity than the Land Rover original, which is infamously prone to sagging. The roof lining is hand-crafted from high-quality plush suede-like material. It’s sold as a complete kit with all the necessary ﬁttings and comes in a choice of no less than ten colours from Alston Black through to Luna White.

INTERNAL WINDOW TRIMS Masai developed its internal window trim range to complement

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Wide-bore tailpipe for a hardcore 110 THIS 3” STRAIGHT THROUGH tail pipe will make your 110 the rudest in town. Suitable for Td5 and Puma models, it costs about £115 from Britpart dealers.

Transfer case dipstick for Series trucks ROAMERDRIVE IS FAMOUS for its overdrives, but Britpart dealers also stock the company’s Transfer Case Dipstick Kit for the Series I, II, IIA and III. Consisting of a dipstick tube, which screws into the level plug, and a replacement top cover with a ﬁller plug, this allows you to check the oil level in your Land Rover’s transfer case simply by lifting out its centre seat. Expect to pay around £50 plus the dreaded.

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Britpart grille smartens up your Series III GOT A SERIES III? Britpart’s new Deluxe Grille is a great way to smarten it up. Supplied without a badge, it should cost in the region of £30-35. It’s at www.britpart.com.

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UP, UP AND AWAY The sort of road test you don’t see in mainstream car magazines gives the Defender 90 Words: Olly Sack Pictures: Richard Hair

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a chance to prove itself at the sort of altitudes that are almost as high as its price

hen the new Defender was launched, Land Rover promised that it would be the most capable off-roader the company had ever made. The most capable, and the most high-tech. There’s certainly no denying the fact that in terms of the way the Defender deals with the business of tackling terrain, never before has so much technology been thrown at the problem. But does this alone make it more capable than a simpler, more basic solution? Here’s where we ﬁnd out. Sort of, at least. We have the entry-level Defender 90 – still a high-tech off-roader, to be sure, but equipped with straightforward coils rather than the height-adjustable air springs that hold up the rest of the range. It rides on steel wheels, and wrapped around them are 265/70R18 tyres – the highest proﬁle you can get on a new Defender. And we’re going to take it laning. We’ve previously driven several different versions of the Defender at Eastnor, including the Hard-Top version of this same vehicle. Our conclusion then was that it was probably our favourite out of all the various Defenders we’ve experienced. But launches can be deceptive, and that’s why we’ve travelled up to North Yorkshire to pit the 90 against a set of lanes we know well. Of course, however well you know a lane, you’ll only know what it was like last time you drove it. We had that brought home to us a couple of years ago on the Cam Steps, a lane south-west of Hawes, when we got to the eponymous steps and they weren’t there any more. Now it’s just the Cam Gates. So we knew it wasn’t going to ask the Defender any searching questions. North of Askrigg, however, is Hogg Gill. This isn’t a technical lane as such either, but in the direction we’re going it’s a long, steep descent towards a place called, we kid you not, Crackpot. Long, steep and on very loose pebbles which

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in places are almost like scree. A place where control is essential. Here, a Land Rover Experience instructor would immediately start telling you about Hill Descent Control. What the Defender has is a very clever system which lets you govern the vehicle’s maximum speed using the cruise control buttons. Cruise control is standard on all Defenders, in case you were wondering, even our base-speccer (which, we’d add, is very generously equipped as standard, even if the one we drove was carrying £7670’s worth of options). It’s a brilliant set-up and it’s very, very effective. But we’re always saying that a vehicle with low range should be able to go down hills without needing electronic aids to keep a lid on its speed, so we’re going to do this the proper way. Just shifting the transfer case is a culture shock, because instead of wrestling with a little stubby lever, more often than not having to put it in gear then ease off the clutch until the cogs finally line up and the whole thing comes in with a shuddering clang, you just drop the auto into neutral and turn one of two multi-function electronic dials and bingo.

We start off in low first, to be on the safe side. It’s far too deep, so we flick it up a gear into low second and suddenly it’s trying to run away. Back into first, ho hum, what do you fancy for dinner… let’s try second again, crikey we’re off. There’s a big gap between first and second. It’s not evident at all in everyday driving, but off-road it becomes apparent very quickly. And so now we’ve got a reason for using hill descent control. Set it to sensible miles per hour and flob the box into Drive, and it takes you down a treat. You can adjust the speed up or down with a finger and, unlike on older vehicles you might have driven with earlier versions of HDC, the peace isn’t wrecked by constant chattering noises as the system jumps on and off the brakes like your granny playing Grand Theft Auto. Normally, what goes up must come down. But this is the Yorkshire Dales, so what goes down must come back up again. And further north, just to the far side of Reeth, is Fremington Edge. This isn’t quite as technical as you expect on the way up. But it’s a hell of a climb and the views are immense – glorious, expansive and, when the sun is in the mood, just spectacularly lit. Best of

all, the floor of the valley below is so distant, it’s like being in a plane. But first, we’ve got to get up it. Now, we’ll come and clean and point out what might be obvious from the lush sunshine in the photographs. This all happened last summer. Why are we telling you this now? Because our 90 was a D200 model, with Land Rover’s entry-level engine to go with its (comparatively) modest spec level. Now, six months later, the D200 has been discontinued on all but the Hard-Top commercial version of the Defender. So if you want a base-speccer now, your only choice is the D250 six-pot – a sensational engine, we’re pleased to report, having experienced it in a 110, but the bucket of cold water is that whereas the 90 we drove listed at £44,260 at the time, when you go shopping on Land Rover’s website the base price has somehow now jumped to £58,875. With that rather unwelcome digression out of the way, let’s get back to the D200 engine. The least powerful in the range, it may be, but with 200bhp it’s still packing more output than people used to get by wringing their Td5s into a great big cloud of smoke.

Independent suspension is not the stuff of traditional off-roaders. But at least this version of the Defender has coils rather than air springs – and they give it a character that will be instantly recognisable to anyone who’s driven a 90 of the original vintage

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So it’s no slug. It has already shown us that on the motorway as we travelled up to Yorkshire, and again as we bowled along the A and B-roads leading towards Fremington. It grips, it steers, it handles and it takes off out of corners – yet it also has that gung-ho feeling of body movement and pivot-about-a-point cornering that puts you in mind of the great days, when a 90 was a 90 and anti-roll bars were for people who needed to be driving things that didn’t roll instead. In short, it drives like a 90. Which we didn’t think we’d ever be able to say about a truck with an eight-speed auto, but it really does. If anything, it feels more authentic, more liberated than the old Defender used to after they started having to pin it down with the anti roll-bars it both

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desperately needed and really, really didn’t. That authenticity comes riding into town on a set of independent wishbones, too. It might be coilsprung, but there’s not an axle to be seen. There is something else here, though – which is the latest version of Terrain Response. But what are we going to choose, rock crawl? It’s a rough, stony trail, for sure, but we’d feel a bit silly using a mode named after the sort of stuff people do in America that makes Fremington look like Pall Mall. Grass, Gravel, Snow? It’s hardly that, either. So in the end, we didn’t select any Terrain Response mode and elected just to drive the thing.

And it started easing its way up the hill very confidently indeed. It always feels a bit like cheating, but this is an area where automatic transmission gives you so much confidence – not that you’d expect to be stalling a vehicle with low range and lots of torque, but the ever-present worry of a frightening failed hillclimb is happily absent and you can just concentrate on picking a line and enjoying the view. Even if, in this case, the view is behind you (if you’re going to drive Fremington Edge, and it’s highly recommended, north-to-south is better). Things got rougher as we got higher, with some erratic rocks and axle-twisters to test the 90’s tractability as it picked its way over them. Note we didn’t say articulation – it has some, but it’s limited by the independent suspension layout. That classic image of a Land Rover with a wheel hanging down by a seemingly impossible distance is one you’ll never associate with the new model – even if, to be honest, it’s one that was created largely by modified examples of the old one. The difference being, of course, that people won’t be able to modify the new one in the same way. As it is, ours has been ‘modified’ to the extent that it was fitted with an optional locking diff in the rear. There’s a screen that comes up where you’re in low range which monitors the drivetrain, and this showed us that the rear locker was in

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4x4 4x4

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almost the whole way up the climb. We’d have expected an old 90 to chug its way up without any dramas with just its centre diff engaged, which may say something about the difference between the two vehicles; either way, for sure there wasn’t a hint of wheelspin, not even a chirrup on the way off a rock, for the whole of the ascent. The next lane on our route isn’t quite a continuation of Fremington Edge, but it feels like it. After passing through the other-worldly landscape of abandoned mine workings surrounding the village of Hurst, you carry on east on a road which becomes ever more open before simply running out of tarmac and there you are, descending towards a river crossing via a valley side which ends in the sort of axle twister even a modified old-school 90 would struggle to cross without waving a wheel. You can see from the pictures how the new one reacted. But dramatic though it looks, with low range taking the strain and a bit of judicious work on the anchors at the right time, it simply eased its way off the step and carried on. A little bit of driving technique, we’d say, but mainly just a very good vehicle. That could be a verdict on the new Defender as a whole, actually. It does the job for you – but doesn’t leave you unengaged by the experience. In that way, it’s similar to the old one – which was very engaging indeed but actually did still do a fair bit of the work for you when all’s said and done. To read some of what’s been said about it, you might think that driving the new Defender off-road is basically like being a passenger. It’s not. The rawness of the old one isn’t there, but the sense of involvement is. And though it shares so much technology with the Discovery and Range Rover, you feel closer to the action than in either of those vehicles.

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These are reasons why, for us, the most basic 90 is the best. We understand what air suspension brings to the party, both on and off-road, and we know most of the Defenders Land Rover sells will be models that have it as standard. But to us, the coil springs on this base-speccer add a dimension to its character which makes it the one we’d have. We’ve been round Eastnor several times in 90s and 110s over the last year or so, and some of

them have been worth a lot more money. But the truck we took up Fremington and beyond feels like the real deal. It’s the closest you can get to an old-shape one now – and, far-fetched though it may sound, it’s close enough to feel like they’re two vehicles from the same bloodline. We’re traditionalists when it comes to the way a 4x4 should be – but we’ve got to hold our hands up and say that in this form in particular, the Defender is a completely convincing Land Rover.

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A SERIES OF FORTUNATE Normally, being turned into a hardcore off-road vehicle is the last step on a 4x4’s journey through life. But when you’re talking about a Series I Land Rover, trialling it to death is like barbecuing hot dogs over a pile of £20 notes. And when the modiﬁcations that once turned a meek old 80” into a ﬁerce RTV motor also make for a superior everyday classic… well, it would be rude not to Words: Gary Noskill Pictures: Andy Agar

here are many great imponderables in the world. Where is the edge of the universe? What’s the meaning of life? Is there a heaven? Why on earth is Kanye West so popular? You know, big stuff like that. The biggest of all is a question nobody can answer. What happened to all the old comp motors? Back in the 90s, all the big comp safaris were dominated by TMCs, Warriors and Simmbugghinis. All the big trials were dominated by Class 1 specials and, in the RTV section, Suzuki Samurais, while Rover Club comps were routinely won by hybrids: 88” coilers on the comp front, often based on Qt or Bowler designs, and 80” Series I lookalikes in the trials. If you didn’t want to take it that far, you might get an actual Series I and turn it into a trials weapon by ﬁtting it with a V8 engine. Many did just that, in the days when Series Is were plentiful and turning them into triallers was yet to become an act of either treason, heresy or ﬁnancial madness

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– and the result was no end of heavily battered very early Land Rovers. So, where did all these old competition cars go? Early race trucks do still crop up every now and again, as does the odd Class 1 trialler – but it’s hard not to suspect that these days, there’s an awful lot of much loved vehicles sat in back yards or lock ups around the country with no real prospect of coming out again. Their owners have so many good memories wrapped up in them, and they’d be worth so little either to sell or sell for parts, that they simply stay where they are, year after year, like an old family photo on the mantlepiece. In the case of those battered old Land Rovers, however, there’s no such thing as a Series I that’s not worth strong money. Even when it’s just a bunch of bits you have to scoop it up in the bucket of a digger, a Series I is still a valuable thing. There is, of course, a thriving market in restoring them back to standard. And that’s where a

number of old trials trucks have gone – though they can only even be turned back into bona fide originals if their builder had the foresight to mothball their original engine, gearbox and so on when he first got stuck in. An alternative is to embrace those modifications. Fitting a V8 engine is the quickest way to make an old Landy much more fun on the road, after all. So perhaps the best thing to do with a trialler whose days between the canes are over is to turn it into a cool ride for fun at the weekends or even, whisper it, use as a daily driver. That’s what Andy Agar has done with this one. It’s an example of the happy few old triallers which have been recommissioned for their own form of semi-retirement as fun trucks. No, it’s nowhere near having all the classic car credentials of an original 80. But the mods that were made to it for trialling make it more of a fun truck, too. It is, says Andy, ‘huge fun, easy to drive and very cool.’

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EVENTS

A Rover V8 engine was very much the stuff of trialling success back in the day. And of course, there’s also something a bit hot rod about it. The one-piece front end was conceived as an entirely practical way of allowing access for maintenance and cleaning, but with a bit of work and a couple of hefty front hinges it could add very nicely indeed to the whole street machine thing A major part of this is that under the bonnet is a 3.5-litre Rover V8 engine. The Series I was built to compete in events run by the Cornwall and Devon Land Rover Club, which means it had to comply with ALRC eligibility regs – limiting the choice of donor parts to Rover stuff, essentially, though this includes some deeply splendid engines and equally deeply splendid kit you can use with them so that’s ﬁne. This particular 3.5, for example, runs a recently renewed pair of SU carbs. The manifold is similarly recent, and it breathes in through a pair of K&N

air ﬁlters. It’s equipped with an auto choke, too, as well as electronic ignition and a Maxspark coil. There’s a Kenlowe electric fan to pull air through the radiator, too, with a manual cut-out to prevent it from ﬁring water all over the high-tension system during those deep wading moments. As always with any kind of competition car (or indeed just any kind of car), getting access to the engine bay for maintenance is absolutely essential. If you’ve ever owned a Discovery 3, now is the time to insert your joke of choice. In the case of this Series I, anyway, access is particularly good. That’s because the bonnet lifts up as normal – and then having done that, Andy can unclip the wings and front panel and lift them all off as a one-piece assembly. If there’s a Series I anywhere with better access to its engine bay, we’re yet to see it. There’s good access to the gearbox, too, thanks to a bolt-on crossmember. The gearbox itself is a Series IIA unit – chosen,

as they so often were for trials motors, because of its strength. The pedal box is from a Series IIA, too, and the front axle is from a Series II. The front wheels are turned by a PAS set-up using a Rover P5 steering box and stopped by a Santana disc brake conversion. ‘Stops on a pin and no brake fade when wet!’ says Andy, neither of which is something the vehicle would have been noted for in its original form. Goodridge brake hoses all round help here, too, and there’s a remote brake servo fitted underneath the passenger’s seat. Protected from impacts by a Qt guard, the front diff housing contains a Range Rover unit – providing ideal ratios to go with the V8 engine and meaning the 80 can be used as an everyday car without the need for an overdrive. This of course means that the rear axle contains a Rangey diff too; the axle itself is a Series I job, which were always popular for trials use as they’re narrower than later units and therefore less likely to score penalty points by catching on tightly positioned gates. It has been converted to fully floating halfshafts for the greatest possible strength. The axles run parabolic springs; Series II at the front, where the V8 is heavier than a standard Series I engine, and Series I at the back. They’re finished off with a set of powder-coated steel rims shod with 235/70R16 BFG KO2 All-Terrains. Add in things like front towing hooks, a kill switch and a rear-mounted fuel tank and battery,

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as required by trialling regs, and you have a vehicle which was built, some decades ago, to the sort of standard it took to stand up to the opposition in what has traditionally been one of the most competitive of all the Rover clubs. ’The changes to this vehicle are extensive and well engineered,’ confirms Andy, ‘and were all done back when Series Is were valued in the hundreds of pounds, not the tens of thousands they are today.’ On the subject of good engineering, this is a vehicle which clearly doesn’t need an MOT. But it has one anyway. To get it, Andy took it to former Broad Lane Land Rovers main man Martin for what he describes as ‘extensive chassis and bulkhead repairs’. A clean ticket with no advisories says that they were done right – and that anything else needing sorting was polished off too before the vehicle went on the clock. As anyone who’s sat in a trials truck will confirm, you can treat one of these vehicles to any amount of welding and mechanical work to address the hardships life has thrown at it – and it’ll still look and feel like a trials truck. Which is to say its bodywork will be beaten to death and its cabin will be the grottiest thing ever. But this is where the real changes have been made. As you can see from the pictures, the 80’s panels have received more than just a lick of paint to bring it back to where it is today. It’s not concours-clean, and there’s little in the way of patina to be seen, but it’s very, very straight – and it’s finished off with a new canvas top and hood sticks from Exmoor Trim, which goes beautifully with its jaunty image. Andy also turned to Exmoor for a set of three spade-back seats, which finish off an interior that’s simple, stout and, again, impressively clean. You can see where it’s been freshly painted over the new welding, and the floor is skinned with tidily cut chequer plate. There’s more ally plate in the back, where the bed is home to the battery box and fuel tank – both of which could be moved back to their original positions if a future owner wanted to use the 80 as more of a utility vehicle. We doubt whether anyone would want to inflict that upon it, however. This is a Series I that was taken a long way away from its ‘classic’ condition for a very specific purpose – but even though it’s not original, you’d be no more likely to use it to

do the job of a Transit van than you would a pinsharp hundred-grand example. Like those millionaires’ Land Rovers, this Series I is to be enjoyed. The difference is that all too often, their owners enjoy them by pulling back a dust cover, running their hands over some gleaming panels and only once in a blue moon actually taking them out. The way to enjoy this one, on the other hand, is to drive it work on a sunny day or be the coolest dad ever on the school run. You might even decide to take it out on a Sunday morning for a spot of trialling. Not that that’s any way to treat a classic Land Rover, of course. But this is more than one of those. It’s a classic, and it’s a classic that you can use. And having served its time in the Cornwall and Devon LRC, you can bet your bottom dollar that if you were to take the plunge and enter it in an RTV, it would be very competitive indeed… At the time of writing, the 80” in this article was for sale at a price of £17,995. You can contact the owner via the magazine; email us at alan.kidd@ assignment-media.co.uk and we’ll pass it on

A new set of spade-back seats ﬁnishes off an interior that’s comp-car simple but also showroom clean. The rear-mounted fuel tank and battery box mean it’s strictly only a three-seater, though they could be relocated if you want to share the fun

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SLEEPING BEAUTY

Land Rovers have always been capable of going anywhere in the world. But what do you do when you get there? If the Landy in question is am original Dormobile like this Series IIA, the answer is more or less anything – because wherever your travels take you, a home-from-home will be with you every step of the way Words: Tom Alderney Pictures: Mike Trott

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s winter maintains its chilly grasp upon the Northern Hemisphere, it’s difficult not to pine for a warm desert island free from the headaches of traffic congestion, a stressful working life and constantly being surrounded by people with their faces in their phones. A desert island would be just great. Only there’s little chance of you and your truck being there together, which instantly makes it less appealing. However there are, as you know, many ways in which a person can combine their wanderlust with a love of all things off-road. It’s very easy, for example, to picture a Defender 110 with a roof rack on the top and a DIY home conversion having been crammed inside using all the plywood B&Q can muster. But there is a vehicle out there that is better suited for the job and has been transporting people to the wildest destinations they dare dream of for decades – even before the Defender arrived. The Land Rover 109 was, of course, the ancestor of the 110. And back in the day, the long-wheelbase Series I, II, IIA and III was a familiar sight in the world’s most exotic places. The sort of all-singing, all-dancing expedition builds you see these days, however, were still a long way from becoming reality. What there was, however, was the 109” Dormobile. Converted into a clever, compact and classic home-from-home, this is one of the most recognisable special vehicles ever to be based on a leaf-sprung Landy. The Series IIA here is a particularly winsome example. We were shown around it by Simon Jeans, who had taken custody of it some time previously – albeit in the worst of circumstances. ‘It was my brother’s,’ he explains. ‘But unfortunately he passed away in February 2018,’ explains Simon. ‘He was an almost obsessive Land Rover enthusiast and lavished much time and money on the Dormobile.’ The more we look around it, the more we see that yes indeed, this glorious old Landy has been treated supremely well. Simon’s brother had owned it for just under a decade when he passed, and that’s plenty of time in which to make a good thing better. The Land Rover itself is a 1969 vintage. It’s equipped with the most powerful of the engines offered in the 109” at that time, the 2.6-litre straight-six petrol. It’s an original factory conversion done in the Dormobile factory – and every effort has been

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made to ensure its longevity continues well into the future. And not just as a classic curiosity, either: this is a Landy that’s been revived with an eye to keeping it as viable as ever. The pop-up canvas roof was replaced in 2011, for example. And the cylinder head has been overhauled by Cox and Turner Engineering. How do we know? Because it appears that Simon’s brother was one of the most organised people ever to turn the key in the barrel of a Land Rover’s ignition. Throughout his time as the Dormobile’s owner, Simon’s brother documented virtually every detail regarding his treasured Landy. There are notebooks filled with entries, logging the journeys he went on, the mileages covered and even the cost of fuel when he filled up. The word ‘comprehensive’ is an understatement. He christened the vehicle Dreadnought, after the WWI class of battleships, but despite this she has never been on a voyage beyond the realms of the British Isles. In her 75,000-mile lifetime, this Land Rover has been from Brixham to Blackpool and as far afield as Wales and Scotland, but never crossed the Channel. For many years, though, prior to joining Simon’s family, the Dormobile lay at anchor in the Isle of Man. That will be the reason behind her previous name, Manx, then. Simon, like his brother, clearly admires the engineering of decades gone by. Though he admits to not being as much of a Land Rover devotee. ‘I’m more into tractors,’ he confesses, ‘probably as I work on a farm! ‘I am not an enthusiast in the same way my brother was. I have a 1975 Porsche 911, which is actually my wife’s commuter car, and then I use a 300Tdi Defender for work. ‘It has a galvanised chassis, a Turner Engineering head and no electrics. For me, I want to keep same vehicle and keep it going for as long as possible. That Defender has 240,000 miles on it, but it will never depreciate.’ Growing up with the likes of the Triumph TR6 and MGB, it’s no wonder that Simon has a soft spot for machines built in the 60s and 70s. As he points out, the engineering back then was just

starting to be refined – though it’s still very simple by today’s standards. Take the Dormobile, for instance. It’s full of clever mechanisms, such as front seats that pivot forwards to make the backrest your seat base whilst facing inwards to the centre of the vehicle. It also manages to incorporate two bunks, a stove, table and sink, and there are a number of upgrades which Simon’s brother carried out to help it keep pace with the present day. A heated front windscreen is something that’s still pretty rare even on modern vehicles, for example, while a front disc brake conversion aids stopping power and a split-charge system with twin batteries ensures ample power for the vehicle itself and its on-board leisure systems. There’s an extra fuel tank, too, as well as an overdrive to allow long distances to be more comfortable and less deafening. ‘I used to do a fair bit of sailing,’ continues Simon. ‘And the ergonomics in this Land Rover are better than most boats I’ve been in. But I’m not really into camping – I did ten years in the Army with all the canvas and so on, but now I want a B&B or a nice hotel!’ For Simon’s brother, he made sure the Dormobile felt like home. It’s had personality thrust upon it, right down to the little reminders placed next to all the customised switches and buttons. And while Simon may not share the exact same taste as his brother when it comes to Land Rovers, something that’s clearly common to both is a deep understanding of the respect a classic vehicle deserves.

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Above: The dashboard doesn’t look much different to any other (really well preserved) Series IIA. But further back, the seating and living arrangements are deﬁnitely out of the ordinary Below: Interior ﬂexibility knows no bounds in one of these vehicles. The beds might not match those in the Dorchester for comfort, but then you can’t park the Dorchester under a blanket of Saharan stars or use it as a viewing platform while lions prowl around your camp site Below right: Everything but the kitchen sink? Don’t be ridiculous. It’s got one of those, along with a two-ring burner and grill

‘You look at it like you would with any plot of land,’ says Simon. ‘You’re the custodian, not the owner. Don’t regret moving it on. ‘It’s the same with classic cars. You try and make sure that you move them on in a better or at least the same shape as when they arrived with you. And that’s exactly what my brother did.’ Dormobiles are not something you come across very often, with many of the conversions being undertaken back in the 60s and 70s when foreign holidays were yet to become the norm. But whether for what’s come to be known as a staycation, or for venturing further afield to far-off lands, they were simply fantastic machines. This one stayed in Blighty, and that’s just fine. After all, as we’ve discovered en masse over the last couple of years, Britain is a pretty good place to go travelling too. And for such a magnificent example of classic British engineering, there’s something very appropriate about that. For Simon, he will hold his own memories of this Series IIA Dormobile. Not only of the beautiful, elegant and cleverly engineered vehicle it so clearly is, but as a testament to the type of fanatic his brother was. A proud, skilled and knowledgeable Land Rover enthusiast – and the perfect custodian in whose hands such a fine old classic was able to flourish.

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THE MAGNIFICENT Prior to starting work on this ex-military Land Rover, Sam Morley had already built to bring together everything he had learned from those earlier projects – and yet was also a bit of a busman’s holiday Words: Gary Noskill Pictures: Steve Taylor

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SEVENTH six other modiﬁed 4x4s. This was set in a bizarre way, his seventh off-roader

hen a guy who restores army Land Rovers as his job buys an army Land Rover for a project of his own, it sounds like a bit of a busman’s holiday. However it also sounds like the sort of scene that’s likely to end up with a very nice, very original looking old Landy. And so it may, in most cases. But this isn’t one of them. This is the case of Sam Morley. When we met Sam (and it was a few years ago), he was on his seventh modified 4x4. These had included a Mk1 Mitsubishi Pajero, a Daihatsu Fourtrak and a lifted Toyota Hilux as well as three Land Rovers, and each had been more hardcore than the last. It won’t have escaped your notice that 1+1+1+3 does not equal 7. That’s because off-roader the seventh was another Land Rover – specifically, the one you see here. Before reading on, take a look and see if you can figure out what kind it is. The answer is that it’s a bit older than you might have been thinking. Sam bought it from Anchor Supplies as a direct-release ex-MoD Series III which had been used by the Army as a bomb disposal truck. A nice quiet retirement? Forget it. The Land Rover’s life was about to get more lively, not less. Now, something you need to know about Sam is that he’s a self-confessed petrol head. And a former racing driver. See if you can guess what happened to the Series III’s 2.25-litre engine… What you might find harder to predict is what he replaced it with. The answer is a 200 Tdi. A 200 Tdi which he had rebuilt. And tuned. And then off he went to play and while he was competing in the Mac 4x4 (a much loved and sadly missed event if ever there was one), the engine duly blew up. Now, the Tdi has long since been known for how tunable it is. And for how much said tuning tends to make it blow up, but that’s another story. But anyway, having sunk a load of money into what was now a very heavy piece of scrap, Sam decided to stop messing around and lob in a V8 instead. The V8 in question was a 3.5-litre job from a 110. There’s more get-upand-go there as standard, obviously, but equally obviously this is Sam we’re talking about and he wasn’t going to do anything as boring as leave it alone. No. Instead, he had the head skimmed then put it back together using uprated cams from a 3.9. He also fitted Stromberg racing carburettors, with each of them fed by its own individual fuel pump, and fabricated a unique four-into-one exhaust using 3” pipe. This runs through a modified Ford silencer before exiting through the nearside wing. The result is a lovely V8 burble and a nice, free flow of gases – so free, in fact, that at 3000rpm that side exit turns into a flame thrower. Unlikely to be popular in car parks, but quality hod-rod cred right there. Now, delivering power is not a job for faint-hearted equipment when you’re talking about an engine that spits fire. That’s why Sam opted for an LT85 gearbox rebuilt using Ashcroft internals, along with heavy-duty props and 10-spline Range Rover axles containing hardened halfshafts and 110 CVs. The result was the sort of bullet-proof transmission you need when you’re going in hard off-road. Which is what this Land Rover was built to do.

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Above left: The V8 engine is from a 110, with skimmed heads, cams from a 3.9 and twin Stomberg carbs, each of them fed by its own fuel pump. Behind it, a custom 3” exhaust spits ﬂame from its side-exit tailpipe when the V8 hits 3000rpm Above right: 265/75R16 Insa Turbo Special Tracks provide bags of grip. The arches have been trimmed to clear them on full bump; this is necessary as, though the tyres aren’t the biggest you’ll see on a Landy with a 6” lift, they’re mounted using spacers for added stability Below: All-round protection comes from a Tornado roll cage with extra thick wing bars. Down below, the sills gave way to rock sliders and there’s a heavy-duty guard beneath the military fuel tank. Sam’s a big fan of ex-MOD Defenders: ‘Thicker chassis and better bulkheads,’ he says, ‘and half the battle to work with as the military look after them’

Above: Scorpion winch bumper (remember that name?) is home to a Goodwinch TDS 9.5i with an uprated drum and motor. It also carries a steering guard and front recovery points, as well as mounting points for the ground anchor. Fixed using wing nuts, these make it easy to access during events – and to remove for road use Right: An identical winch is housed in a recessed tray behind a custom rear crossmember. Accessed via a lift-out panel in the chequer-plated rear, this pays out through a hawse fairlead on the back of the crossmember itself, meaning there’s no loss of interior space or departure angle. Both winches are operated using Lodar hands-free remotes

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Hence a suspension set-up, created with rock-crawling in mind, in which +6” Rock Stomper springs are complemented by Pro-Comp ES9000 shocks on -3” mounts. Sam fitted the coils upside-down, considering this to be better for tackling really large objects as it tends to push the body up rather than the axle down. This, he told us, creates a kind of ‘floating’ sensation in the cabin, and it’s not so good in deep mud, but for rocks the size of a car (or actual cars, as he was kind enough to demonstrate) it’s spot-on. To let the suspension flex yet more, Sam added X-Eng dislocation cones at both ends. And with all that on its side, he had a Land Rover which hugged the ground so effectively that fitting ARBs in the axles would seem kind of superfluous. So, of course, he did what you and I would do too and fitted ARBs in the axles, along with a set of homemade guards to protect them from impacts. This isn’t the only area in which the Land Rover is armoured. The original sills were removed in order to fit custom-built rock sliders, and Sam also fabricated a guard for the fuel tank – which itself is a military-spec double-skinned item. Up top, meanwhile, is a full external roll cage from Tornado Motorsport. Which brings us, kind of, to the elephant in the room. As we mentioned, you’re looking at a Series III. But what you’re looking at is quite obviously not one. ‘The vehicle was in fair order,’ Sam explained to us. ‘But it needed some cosmetic attention. I eventually replaced the body with one from a 90, because I much prefer its appearance.’ Fair enough. If you spend your days flipping burgers in McDonalds, you probably won’t want burgers for dinner – so if your job is to restore old military Land Rovers for other people, why would you want to follow the normal rules when you’re doing your own? And however much it looks like a 90, this is still a classic Land Rover. Kind of. It might have lost

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its engine, gearbox, axles and body to the cause, but the chassis underneath it all is still original. At least, it’s original in the sense that it’s the one upon which the vehicle did its time in HM Armed Forces. Not in the other sense, though. It might be the original one, but it’s in far from original condition. Sam saw to that at the very start of the rebuild. He stripped the Landy right down and went at the chassis with his grinder, removing the leaf spring mounts and the rear crossmember before welding on a fabricated winch tray and a full set of brackets for converting it the coil-sprung set-up described above. Mounted flush so as not to add to the vehicle’s departure angle, the tray became home to a Goodwinch TDS 9.5i with an uprated drum and motor. There’s another of these up front, too, mounted on a tubular bumper from Scorpion Racing. You need to be a certain age to remember that name, but the company’s products are still to be seen on a great many Land Rovers today. Ensuring the winches are always ready to do their thing, Sam wired up an IBS split-charge system tying together not one, not two but three Optima Yellow-Tops. Well, you don’t ever hear people saying how great it is when 4x4s are under-engineered, do you? Continuing on that theme, the axles’ original brakes made way for a set of four-pot calipers supplied by extra-long braided hoses. And on the inside, the crew are held in a pair of Cobra race seats by three-point harnesses.

You could say that these are the things you learn to take seriously when you’re on your seventh off-road build, and sure enough a lot of knowledge went into this truck. Some of it might have come from a Hilux, or a Pajero, or a Fourtrak – but as it turns out, those projects were all building up to this one. By the time you’ve done seven modified vehicles, after all, you ought to have got a few things straight in your mind. And sure enough, when we watched this 90 in action it had all the hallmarks of a really well thought out motor. Really well thought out but also interestingly lairy, though – in a cheerfully car-crushing, flame-spitting kind of a way. And on top of it all, still a classic ex-military Series III Landy.

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SHORT AND TO THE POINT You don’t see many modified P38 Range Rovers going about the place. And you certainly don’t see many bobtailed ones. But this early 4.6 HSE is an example of bodyworking art at its finest – though a superbly done rear end is only the start of its skills Words: Paul Looe Pictures: Harry Hamm

ack when the original Range Rover was beginning to get on a bit, people were quick to start using them off-road. With the live-axled, ladder-chassised basis of a proper truck, the old Classic (as it came to be known a decade and more later) was ideal for comping, trialling and generally hacking into a toy. It had huge axle travel, full-time four-wheel drive, disc brakes all round and a grunty V8 engine. It wasn’t just the best luxury vehicle Land Rover had ever made: it was the best Land Rover Land Rover had ever made. Except for one thing. One very big thing. And that very big thing was a very big rear overhang. The Range Rover’s proportions are beautiful, elegant, perfect, timeless… all these and more. But first time you come to a failed hillclimb, not even one of those freakshow internet weirds flaunting their butt lift catastrophes on social media could ever hang out as cringe-inducingly far as a Rangey’s back end. This, of course, is why people started bobtailing them. And very popular it became, because

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it was so easy to do. As always, there were good ones and bad ones, but ultimately you were dealing with metal and not a lot else, and there’s only so much that can go wrong. Which is, in turn, why you don’t see many bobtailed P38s. Compared to modern Range Rovers, the second-generation model was still a truck (ladder chassis, proper axles, lever-operated transfer case, good stuff like that), but its reliance on electronics meant it was on a whole new level of complexity. To mess with one of these, you need to be made of stern stuff. That much is clear. But fortunately, such people do exist. And the Range Rover you see here is what happens when the stern stuff in question comes with a side order of being a bodywork specialist. We don’t know the name of the man who did the work, because he had already sold the vehicle by the time we caught up with it. It took him three years to get the job more or less done, but then by a cruel twist of fate he was injured in an accident and couldn’t carry on.

‘I was in the right place at the right time,’ explains Damian Roberts, who took his chance to fork out for a unique P38 with 18” very skilfully removed from its rear overhang. It had also been converted from air suspension to coils, giving it a slight lift in the process, and fitted with a Safety Devices internal roll cage. The latter had to be modified to fit, as the bobtail job meant there wasn’t any room for the rear stays. But though it was no longer complete, there was still enough about it to keep the vehicle up in an everyday roll. Not that Damian demonstrated this to us, but it was clear to see that the structure was more robust than standard with the cage in place. So that’s where it was when Damian bought it. And this is where it was when we showed up clutching a camera. Those tyres are 33x12.50R15 Maxxis Bighorns, and ‘a slight lift’ is not going to make room for something like that under any Range Rover we’ve ever seen. So it’s not on a slight lift any more. It’s on a 4” lift, achieved using +2” Old Man Emu springs

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BMW’s 3.0-litre, six-cylinder M57 turbo-diesel engine has become a very popular way of repowering Land Rovers; the Range Rover certainly goes a lot better with it than it ever did with the unsuitably small 2.5-litre four-pot Solihull used from new. This one, which took the place of the vehicle’s original 4.6-litre V8, breathes in through a stainless steel snorkel – and out through, er, a rock slider…

Above, left: The guy who bobtailed the Range Rover was a bodywork specialist. This is the fruit of three years’ worth of skilled labour – and it shows. A Safety Devices roll cage adds to the strength of the overall structure, though its rear stays had to go to make it ﬁt Below: Damian remade the panhard rods after one of the originals proved not to be up to the job, setting off a chain of events that ended up with the engine going in the scrap bin. In the absence of an off-the-shelf means of castor correction, the front radius arms ride on dropped chassis mounts

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on spacer blocks with +5” Terrafirma front and +2” Pro-Comp rear shocks. Damian, who’s a welder by trade, fitted these while also mounting the radius arms on dropped chassis brackets which he fabricated himself; in the absence of an off-the-shelf solution to the issue of castor correction, this was his way of returning the arms to their correct angle. He also fabricated a new set of panhard rods to replace the ones that were on the vehicle when he bought it. Whereby hangs another tale. Thus far, we’ve not said anything about the Range Rover’s engine. This is a BMW diesel unit – but not the one with which it left the factory. As you probably know, the P38 was produced with a 2.5-litre four-pot diesel. It was a great engine… in the BMW 3 Series. Trying to shift a Range Rover around? Less so. The M57 3.0-litre six-pot from the 5 Series, on the other hand, now that was an engine. And in this case, it still is. Damian’s Range Rover was originally a 4.6-litre V8, but somewhere down the line a previous owner had managed to give it the good stuff. That’s not an easy job. It required a custom torque converter plate – as well as needing a fearsome three months with an auto electrician, who spent all that time trying to figure out how to fool the gearbox ECU into accepting that nothing was wrong. So where do the panhard rods come into the story? ‘From below’ is the rather painful sounding

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answer. While Damian was out playing off-road one time, the front axle dropped out on one side, as they do, and its panhard rod snapped. This let the body move sideways, taking the engine with it – which happened just as the axle was on its way back up again. And bang, the front diff gave the sump a mighty one. ‘I checked it afterwards to see if there was any oil leaking out,’ says Damian. ‘There wasn’t, so I set off for home. Turned out there was no oil leaking out because there was no oil in it!’ Cue one seized engine… So this isn’t just a P38 that’s had a BMW 3.0-litre diesel put in it. It’s a P38 that’s had two BMW 3.0-litre diesels put in it. Hardly surprisingly, Damian went like-for-like with the replacement unit – for one thing because he was very happy with the way it performed and saw no reason at all to change it, and for another because anything else would turn a big job into a colossal one. One change he did make was to weld gussets in to the inside corners of the sump, so that should the same thing happen again the diff would come up against three times the thickness of metal that it did before. Since we’re on the subject of heavy metal, the Range Rover is fitted with heavy-duty bumpers and rock sliders. The latter are particularly interesting, not just because they’re so firmly anchored to the chassis that you could hang the car off them but because the one on the left is also the exhaust pipe.

Yes, you read that right. Damian ran the exhaust across the vehicle and into the body of the rock slider, from which it exits though what must be the most over-engineered side pipe in the history of the world. Sometimes, buying someone else’s modified vehicle can come across as a bit of a cheat. But safe to say that’s not the case here. A tremendous amount of time had already gone into it, as well as what the previous owner estimated to be around £15,000 of readies, but Damian knew what he was getting – and he put in plenty of his own hard graft to get it to the shape you see here. And it was all set to stay in the same shape, too. Because when we met him, Damian was also the proud owner of not one but two traybacks. That’s where he got his off-road fix, so the Range Rover had moved on up and become his wife’s daily driver. All that work, all that toil to create a bobtailed P38 and it ends up not even being used offroad? Yes, we thought that too. But then we also thought back to that age-old quote, ‘no man with a good car needs to be justified’ – and this is more than just a good car, it’s a brilliant one. After all, when the P38 era ended, Range Rovers stopped being trucks. You don’t see many people bobtailing them, but you never see anyone doing it to a later one. However it seemed at the time, this is an old-school Rangey – and in the way it was turned into the off-road weapon it became, it became an old-school project too.

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14/01/2022 21:05

MASAI DOUBLES DOWN ON THE Td5 110 Double-Cab provides the perfect blank canvas for a leading accessory maker to Words and pictures: Dan Fenn

ack in the day, there were Defenders and there were double-cabs. The Defenders, of course, we know about; the double-cabs were Japanese. They started coming in via grey importers and attracted a lot of interest, then began appearing as official UK vehicles and caught on in a huge way. Eventually, someone in an office at Land Rover must have figured out that the double-cabs weren’t going to go away. And so the company made one of its own. The 110 DC wasn’t enough to stop the trickle that turned into a flood of sales for

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Toyota, Mitsubishi and all, but it did yield one of the most evocative body shapes to feature in the latter-day Defender line-up. From the word go, you could get the 110 Double-Cab in range-topping XS spec with things like alloys, ABS, air-con and half-leather seats. And jolly nice it was too. But not as nice as it could be – as this 2002 Td5 illustrates. It’s been built by Masai 4x4 as a demonstrator and development vehicle, mixing a variety of equipment the company is already famous for with other items it intends to be famous for in the near future.

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NEW BREED OF DEFENDERS show the extent of what it can do to turn your Defender into a classy, contemporary truck

Masai is possibly most widely known for the Panoramic Windows it makes for the Defender 90 and 110. Obviously, a Double-Cab isn’t what you’re going to choose if you want a set of these – however it’s as well set as any Defender for interior trim upgrades. And in this respect, the Masai team has gone to town on the example you’re looking at. The ﬁrst thing you’ll notice is that the seats have been retrimmed in a particularly classy looking cream leatherette with black piping. It looks like it belongs in a Range Rover but it’s the

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sort of thing that’s becoming more common on Defenders and Masai’s Trim Shop offers a wide range of options for owners looking to reinvent their trucks’ interiors. The company’s covers are made from cruelty-free soft vinyl leatherette and come complete with map pockets. They’re even foam backed for extra comfort, and the results are there to see – and to feel, because they’re lovely to sit in. Naturally, there’s a range of colours available – and the same goes for Masai’s head linings. These are made from GRP for rigidity, and to

prevent them from soaking up water over time. They’re lined in plush suede, and you can get them in a choice of ten different hues to match the seats. The 110 has been fully carpeted, too, again to match the seats and headlining. The overall effect is classy but not tarty, the way some aftermarket treatments can be, with an element of conﬁdent understatement to its appearance that perfectly illustrates what Masai’s accessories are about. It’s all set off by a blinding array of aluminium trim items that’s so diverse it’s actually quite hard to keep track of. Looking around the cabin, we spotted a polished alloy ﬁnish on the gearstick and transfer lever knobs, air vents and dash-top vent slots, door handles, seat adjusters, fuse box screws, fan controls, headlamp switch and column stalk ends. Masai does more besides, but the door cards for this vehicle were still a work in progress when we visited so items like the lock buttons were still original. Something else you’ll enjoy feasting your eyes upon, at least if you know enough about these things to be able to see beneath the surface of what’s apparent, is the double-DIN conversion that allows the use of much more up-to-date infotainment set-ups than the Defender was designed for. Actually, the sort of infotainment system the Defender was designed for is a rolled up copy of yesterday’s Yorkshire Post sitting on the dashboard while the driver sings No Regrets

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In a world that’s full of blinged up Defenders, Masai’s 110 looks classy but restrained enough not to be accused of having gone over the top. You could have a go at counting how many different ways there are visible here in which it’s been upgraded from standard, but we bet you wouldn’t manage to his dog, so putting it into reverse and seeing the media screen light up with the image from a reversing camera is definitely a culture shock. Actually, just seeing a media screen is a culture shock, but we’re talking about a Defender with cream coloured seats so it’s one that’s quite easy to get used to.

Another bit of electronic wizardry currently to be found in this 110 is a prototype conversion allowing the rear windows to be operated from the front. If you’ve got kids of a certain age, you’ll know why this is a good thing. There are plenty of Defenders with electric windows front and rear, but Masai 4x4 boss Ferzan

Kuman explained to us that until now, you’ve only been able to get them with local controls – the switches in the front operate the windows in the front, and the same deal at the back. The company’s conversion, which is currently undergoing testing in this vehicle, adds a pair of switches on the front of the cubby box console which allow

Above: Masai’s seat covers are made from a cruelty-free soft leatherette and come with extra padding to add comfort – which they do, very effectively. The classy cream finish with black piping looks like it belongs on a Range Rover, but it’s typical of the sort of approach more and more Defender owners are taking with their vehicles – and between the seats, the carpets and the head lining, the overall appearance inside the vehicle’s cabin really is transformed Below left: A double-DIN conversion allows the Defender to run a much more modern infotainment system than it was originally designed to support. Note the understatement in that sentence… Below centre: Heated front seats are among the few luxuries the Defender offered from new. Masai’s conversion brings this option to the rears, too, with controls mounted in the back of the cubby box Below right: Here’s one you’d have been doing incredibly well to spot in the picture at the top of the page. Among the very many stainless steel items of trim in the 110’s cabin, these vent inserts prove that there really is nothing you can’t upgrade if you’ve got the imagination

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the driver or front-seat passenger to take charge of what’s happening in the back. ‘No-one else does that,’ says Ferzan of what will be brought to the market as a full electric window kit with this unique feature. Staying in the back, the rear seats join those up front in being heated. This too is a Masai conversion, and one that’s new to this particular vehicle in both rows – 110 Double-Cabs that came out of the factory in XS form had heated front seats as standard, but this was an everyday work truck before Ferzan got his hands on it. For the same reason, its Boost alloys arrived in later life, as you’d assume did the 265/75R16 BFGoodrich KM3 Mud-Terrains wrapped around them. There’s a new suspension kit hiding behind the wheels, though this came from a third-party supplier rather than being one of the many products made in the Masai factory. This is based in Ferzan’s homeland of Turkey and is run by his brother – it’s very much a family company which, though it’s been going since 1953, is still run on the sort of scale that allows it to have a human face. The factory is split into four parts making products in the various areas Masai serves, and the direct-sale policy is something he believes is a positive asset. By selling items it has designed and manufactured itself and dealing direct with end users, it cuts out the endless opportunities for messiness that come from either buying in specialist stock from someone else or punting it out via a third-party distribution network. As it is, as well as selling accessories the company offers a ﬁtting service for everything in its range. Electrical upgrades, sound deadening, headlining, internal trims, seat retrimming… if you want it but you don’t want to ﬁt it yourself, they

can shoulder the burden. Ferzan says the company has all the skills to ﬁt anything at all from elsewhere in the aftermarket, too, ‘but our focus is on reﬁts using our own parts.’ These parts also include a heavy-duty steering guard, mesh grille and tubular roof rack, all of which help make this 110 look as cool from the outside as it does in the cabin. You can tell just by looking that it’s been dressed up, but it’s an awful lot more subtle than the kind of modded Defender you see riding around the place on 37” tyres with an interior that’ll end up with you getting your collar felt by the taste police. Masai was never about pimp trucks. The company concentrates on items that add something

of value to the vehicle and are also good looking into the bargain – and items like its infotainment conversion, roof lining and electric window kit are perfect examples. As of course are the cream leatherette seats that make such a special truck out of this 110. And it is a special truck. The 110 Double-Cab might not have been the ﬁrst thing on Land Rover’s mind when it designed the Defender, and it may not have done enough to stem the ﬂow of sales towards the new breed of pick-ups from the Far East. But it’s an icon by all means – and this distinctive looking example of the breed is helping Masai 4x4 develop the kit you’ll soon be using to make it more iconic than ever.

At the time of writing, Masai’s 110’s was for sale. It’s showing 156,000 miles and priced at £34,999; you’ll ﬁnd it, and everything else the company does, at www.masai4x4.com

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DECEMBER 2021 | 9

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THE TRAIL LESS TRAVELLED Coast-to-coast across the USA is one of the world’s great road trips. Thanks to one man, it’s

Words: Kaziyoshi Sasazaki Pictures: Land Rover North America

ay back in 1984, when Land Rover’s last leaf-sprung Series III models were coming down the production line at Solihull and the birth of the Discovery was still more than half a decade away, a young trail biking enthusiast by the name of Sam Correro had a big idea. The sort of

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big idea you can only have if you’re from a big country. Fortunately, Correro hails from one of the biggest of the lot. His home town of Corinth is in the north-eastern corner of Mississippi, right on the border with Tennessee and a few miles west of the Alabama state line. So, as a man who liked to go out and explore the

countryside on two wheels, he didn’t half have a big playground. And that was where his big idea came from. It was in 1984 that he ﬁrst started researching the unpaved roads and trails of the USA with the aim of creating a cross-country off-road route. He pored over hundreds of maps, rode thousands of miles and

surveyed countless potential routes – until finally, twelve years later, the Trans America Trail was born. Starting in eastern Tennessee and finishing on Oregon’s Pacific Coast, this was a single route covering around 5000 miles and passing through nine states (as well as various forests, vast tracts of farmland, a desert and the Rocky

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also an epic off-road adventure – and two Discovery 4s were the first 4x4s ever to take it on

Mountains). We say ‘was’, because since then it has been modified to include one section taking it to the Pacific in California and others linking it to the Atlantic coast. These days, the main trail starts in West Virginia, heads west to the Utah-Nevada border then loops north and east again to finish in Wisconsin. An associated Shadow

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of the Rockies trail runs north through New Mexico and Colorado, crossing the main route once then linking up with it at the southern edge of Wyoming. Wherever you’re from in the world, these are names that conjure up images of adventure – following in the footsteps of the pioneers as they crossed the heartland through

majestic landscapes where bears, coyotes and mountain lions roam free. If you’re not already dreaming of shipping your truck to the States so you can join the many others who have followed the Trans America Trail from end to end, there’s something the matter with you. You wouldn’t be the first to do it in a Solihull motor, though. That’s because in the summer of 2013, a team of three Discovery 4s set out on Expedition America – a monthlong coast-to-coast crossing of the USA using almost no paved roads at all. Though the expedition had its own unique route, the organisers based the bulk of it on the Trans America Trail. And though this was an official expedition run by Land Rover’s US importer, it wasn’t a stage-managed media show – done without any pre-scouting, it was intended to demonstrate the vehicles’ capabilities in what was a true overland adventure. The Trail’s website, which Sam Correro still runs himself, describes the going as a mixture of ‘dirt, gravel, forest, farm and brief sections of paved roads.’ That doesn’t sound too challenging, but read on: ‘Depending on the weather and location, riders may face challenges including mud, sand, snow, and rocks among others.’ This was definitely going to be a challenge… And what sort of people does Land Rover turn to when it’s faced with a challenge? That would be its very own Driving Experience instructors, of course – and better still if they also happen to be Camel Trophy veterans. Step forward Tom Collins. He was one half of the USA team that finished second in the Camel in 1987 – the year when a convoy of Range Rovers achieved the first ever full transit of Madagascar’s east coast. It was a proper off-road endeavour back then, with no need for gimmicky special tasks involving snowboards or mountain bikes, and it’s no wonder so many of those who battled through it have gone on to become celebrity figures in Land Rover’s operations around the world. For Collins, this meant becoming the team manager who oversaw the

USA’s 1993 Camel Trophy victory in the jungle of Malaysia. By this time he was also heavily involved in Land Rover’s press events and vehicle launches, and in 1989 he created and led the fabled Great Divide Expedition – a 1100-mile transit of the highest peaks in the Rockies which demonstrated the Range Rover’s masterful ability at a time when the vehicle had only been on sale in North America for a couple of years. With a leader like that at its head, the Expedition America convoy was in good hands as it set out on its marathon route – appropriately, starting from the Land Rover Experience centre in Asheville, North Carolina. The trio of Discoverys in the pictures will look familiar enough to British eyes, but in fact they were quite different to the models we got here. For one thing, they weren’t called Discoverys at all – in North America, the vehicle was marketed as the LR4. There was a difference under the bonnet, too. Whereas the Disco 4 we got here was powered by a 3.0-litre diesel engine, the LR4 got a version of Land Rover’s 5.0-litre V8 developing 375bhp and 375lbf. ft. But in other ways, it dished up the same hearty fare; integrated body-frame construction, permanent four-wheel drive, low range, height-adjustable air suspension and locking front and (optionally) rear diffs. As with the UK model, this was backed up by a raft of high-tech traction aids to help get over the limited articulation in its all-independent suspension. It didn’t take long for them to be working for their living, either. Setting off from Asheville, the convoy was straight on to a series of mountain trails – and into swathes of low cloud. By the time they crossed into Tennessee, the clouds had well and truly opened – turning forest roads into streams and streams into torrents. All the same, it was here that the unrelenting march of progress has unwelcome side-effects. ‘In Tennessee, the trails are already increasingly being paved,’ explained

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With Sam Correro piloting them as they crossed the Deep South, the Discoverys pressed ahead through the sweltering heat and humidity of high summer. The mercury was knocking on for 100 degrees as they crossed the Mississippi (below) – though when your route takes you through Clarksdale, the famous home of the blues, however hot the weather might be everything is still going to be pretty cool Collins. ‘Who knows how long it will be before other states do the same with their unsealed roads? This is an expedition with a shrinking environment as its challenger.’ It should also be noted that at the time of this expedition, no record existed of anyone having previously done the whole of the Trans America Trail on four wheels. So the pioneering spirit was very real, even if the convoy was following a well researched route. Certainly, bikers they encountered along the way

were fascinated to see the vehicles as they progressed westward. None of the Discoverys needed to use their winches, but the weather was a perfect illustration of why a means of recovery was so important. Even on established dirt roads, you never know what might happen – especially when Mother Nature is doing her best to wash the surface away. Something else each of the vehicles was carrying was a three-strong crew of drivers and

navigators. Everybody wants to be behind the wheel, of course – but in a month of 13-hour days, fatigue is a real issue, so a regular regime of driver changes was essential. Further on as the vehicles continued their journey west, they were joined by a very special guest – Sam Correro himself. The creator of the Trans America Trail hooked up with the convoy as it passed his home town of Corinth

and joined the Land Rovers for a stint aboard his bike as the route crossed the Mississippi and passed through the majestic landscape of the Ozark Mountains. ‘Land Rover Expedition America could not have happened without Sam and his thirty years of research,’ said Collins. ‘It is an honour to have him join us for a few days.’ With the father of the Trail as its

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honorary leader, the convoy had an almost literal watershed moment as it followed his motorbike along picture-perfect farm tracks leading the route across the Mississippi. It wasn’t half beautiful, but it also wasn’t half hot. As they crossed into Arkansas, the mercury was tipping 100 degrees – which, combined with the oppressive humidity of high summer in the southern states, meant the crews were very grateful to be travelling in modern, climatecontrolled Land Rovers. Just a few hours inland from the Gulf of Mexico, this is the most southerly point on the Trans America Trail. The Deep South will forever be associated with blues music; there’s a thing called the Mississippi Blues Trail, which is another story altogether, but just prior to crossing the big river the expedition passed through the town of Clarksdale. This calls itself the ‘Home of the Blues’ and even has its own downtown Walk of Fame to prove the point. Plaques here honour local blues men – including Ike Turner, Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker. Big hitters, then. A big hitter from another area of performing art is Morgan Freeman,

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who part-owns the Ground Zero Blues Bar in Clarksdale. Now, this was an expedition, not a holiday, but sometimes you’ve got to take a moment – and when the man who’s played God, Nelson Mandela and the President of the USA is in town and you’ve got the chance to meet him, you don’t say no. The team also met renowned blues musician James Johnson, nicknamed ‘Super Chikan’, who’s famous for making his own guitars from jerry cans – just like the ones the Discoverys were carrying. ‘If you give me one, I’ll make you a guitar in time for the end of the trip,’ he offered. It doesn’t matter how precious your jerry cans are when fortune smiles on your like that. Driving behind Correro, the expedition crossed the Mississippi River in 100-degree heat and oppressive humidity into Arkansas at Helena. This was the most southerly point on the journey, just hours north of the Gulf of Mexico. But things were to change quickly as the route swung north – and started to climb into the Ozark Plateau. Covering around 45,000 square miles, the Ozarks stretch from the west bank of the Mississippi to

south-eastern Kansas and into the north-eastern corner of Oklahoma. They cover a good proportion of southern Missouri and extend well into northern Arkansas – which is where Correro stopped for a breather to reflect on the creation of the Trans America Trail during a brief pause in the expedition’s relentless march onwards. Sitting by a mountain road near the town of Oark (whose name apparently comes from French, as opposed to someone with a broken Z button on his keyboard), Correro reminisced on the early days of his research. ‘I just kept heading west, finding outback roads that linked to other outback roads. I arrived into Oklahoma and then Colorado from my home in Mississippi. At that point, I figured maybe I had a shot at reaching the Pacific.’ With Correro leading the way, the convoy of Land Rovers climbed to 3000 feet above sea level on tight, twisting mountain trails. Progress was slow, as it should be when you’re off-roading, and the days were as long as ever – with early starts meaning the convoy was often sharing the landscape with native wildlife. They spotted deer,

turtles and coyotes in the Ozarks, along with a good many bison; the latter were being farmed as cattle, but they made an impressive site nonetheless amid the spectacular scenery. Dropping down towards Alma, Arkansas, the trail becomes dramatically washed out, requiring no small amount of skill and concentration whether you’re on two wheels or four. Correro inched forward, balancing on his pegs, while the Discoverys picked their way through the rocky axle-twisters with their Terrain Response programmes working overtime. This was the final part of Correro’s stint at the head of the Expedition America convoy. Turning around in Alma to head back east, he promised the Land Rover team that what they had experienced thus far was no more than a taster – and he certainly wasn’t joking. With Collins now leading the way, the vehicles’s next challenges involved tackling the southern Midwest, the towering Rockies and the Utah desert – all the while facing ever-changing and often extreme weather. The mercury had climbed above 100 degrees as they crossed

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In White Oak, Oklahoma, the Trans-America Trail intersects with Route 66. There’s an irony here, in that the unmade tracks the Discoverys were following date from the era of the Gold Rush, while the fabled Mother Road was created a century later – yet it’s the Trail that exists today in a continguous form, whereas Route 66 has largely disappeared under the interstates that replaced it

the Mississippi: now they were pressing on amid tornado warnings and the threat of lingering snow on the highest trails. First, they had to polish off another challenge – that of getting past the unending flatness of the Great Plains. A landscape that seems to go on forever, even when you’re zipping across it on the interstate, this takes even longer when you’re doing all of it on gravel trails like the one following the Kansas-Oklahoma border. ‘If it’s not clear already,’ said Collins as they set off from Alma, ‘the next week will show the sheer enormity of this undertaking. The US is a big place – never more so than when you are crossing it on dirt!’ In a landscape without many highlights, a notable moment while

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following the Kansas-Oklahoma border was the Trail’s intersection with Route 66. The famed Mother Road is less than half the length of the Trans America Trail but as they crossed it in White Oak, north-east of Tulsa, the crews could reflect on the history beneath their wheels. In many ways, the dirt tracks the Discoverys were following resembled the sort of roads the original pioneers took during the Gold Rush of the 19th Century; Route 66, on the other hand, was a symbol of westward migration during the 20th Century. Now, ironically, Route 66 no longer exists. For much of its length, it has been upgraded and renamed as part of the interstate system, while in other areas the course it once took is gone forever. In between

these extremes, some precious old sections do remain, sometimes signposted as ‘Historic Route 66’, and every so often you’ll strike gold and find a faded old marker painted on the roadway itself, but there’s no denying that these days, it’s incomplete. The tracks that came before it, however, remain much as they were in the days when those Gold Rush pioneers raced west in their covered wagons – the difference being that a couple of horses have now been replaced by,

in the Discoverys’ case, a 375bhp, 5.0-litre V8 engine. Literally the only modifications to the Discoverys were factory-fit winches, roof racks and skid plates. ‘Doing this in stock vehicles is important,’ said Collins, ‘as it clearly demonstrates the capability of the LR4 that anyone can buy at their local dealership.’ Obviously the LR4 has given way to the Discovery 5 since then (it’s now known as the Discovery in North America too) but the point remains the same – it’s a

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There was a time when these tracks were used by horse-drawn carriages and nothing else. Progress has changed all that – instead of two horses, the Discos were propelled by the 375bhp of their 5.0-litre V8 engines – but at least the tracks themselves remain

premium family SUV, but it’s a real Land Rover too and it comes with serious off-road ability built in. And this was about to be tested, too. The miles rolled by, and by, and by, as the convoy made its way through the featureless landscape of northern Oklahoma, southern Kansas and north-eastern New Mexico, crossing the famous Santa Fe Trail then entering Colorado – where everything changed. In front of them, the eastern flank of the Rocky Mountains rose like a wall,

the 14,000-foot summit of Pikes Peak looming in the distance as they headed towards what was set to be the biggest challenge of the month’s driving. And that is indeed how it turned out. After a badly needed rest day in Colorado Springs, the convoy set out again into the mountains – and four days later, no-on could remember how many different highlevel passes they had negotiated. At times, these climbed to more than 12,000 feet – that’s similar in height

to the Eiger, or three Ben Nevises on top of each other. At these altitudes, the passes are normally only free of snow during August. Even then, however, it’s not guaranteed – and with the Rockies having been buffeted by storms during the previous weeks, there was a real danger that the Discoverys would get so far only to find the way ahead blocked. Having already encountered extreme heat, flooding and massive thunderstorms, it would have been entirely in keeping… Sure enough, some snow did fall as the vehicles were picking their way over Black Bear Pass. Thankfully, though, the way ahead was still clear – though that didn’t make it easy. Black Bear is a well kept trail with a surface composed of loose stone, but as you descend from the summit you need to take it very, very steadily to avoid building

up momentum. The switchbacks come thick and fast, and going over the edge would be a one-way trip into oblivion – something that’s thrown sharply into focus by the fact that you’re relying on your vehicle to maintain its poise on what is essentially scree. This is where the Discoverys’ Terrain Response and Hill Descent Control came into their own, allowing the drivers to remain in control and concentrate on placing the vehicles safely away from the lip of the track. After a high-adrenaline off-road challenge like this, it can be nice to put your wheels back on to tarmac for a while. But there was no such luxury in store here, as the goal of crossing America on unmade roads remained very much intact. Thus, having reached the midway point in the expedition as they passed through Colorado, the vehicles’ next challenge was to

Every mile brought its own challenge, but it was in the Rockies that the Discoverys really earned their living. At altitudes similar to three Ben Nevises on top of each other, these trails are normally open for one month a year – and even then, there’s no guarantee that you’ll be able to make it through

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negotiate the track into Utah. In contrast to the epic trails of the Rockies, this simply runs parallel to the interstate, so close that you can hear the rumble of traffic from within the cabins of their Discoverys. That was easy enough, but while I-70 continues in the same vein the Trans America Trail suddenly becomes much less placid. Black Dragon Canyon is one of the most technical parts of the entire route, requiring the vehicles to edge along cautiously with Terrain Response set to Rock Crawl mode. Rarely getting above walking pace, they continued this for some 14 hours.

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In some parts, this section of the trail is overlooked by 1000 year-old cave paintings under the lip of a canyon wall. The crews probably weren’t paying much attention to that, though, because the driving was so intense. They were looking out for rattlesnakes, too, which is always sure to focus the mind… As this suggests, the expedition had moved into a new kind of landscape with an arid climate. The route of the Trans America Trail took the vehicles from Utah into Nevada – where Collins’ team learned that unbeknown to them, they had just had an incredibly lucky escape.

Close to the town of Salina, the crews had watched in awe as an intense storm brewed up. Moving on, what they didn’t know was that this had gone on to cause a flash flood, turning the trail they were on at the time into a deep, fast-flowing river. Literally two hours after they had passed through, their route had become completely impassable. A pair of motorcyclists riding the Trail caught up with the Discoverys further along the route and showed the team some pictures they had taken of the flooding. ‘That would have been impossible to cross and we would have lost at least a day,

maybe more, waiting it out,’ said Collins. Fortune favours the brave… Fortune also favours the careful, and as always on an expedition everyday maintenance is critical. In the fine white dust of the Nevada desert, this means cleaning out your air filters almost every time you stop. The stuff is like talcum powder, its tiny particles capable of getting everywhere. Now, too, the climate was once again searingly hot, with the temperature back up over 100 degrees. Previously, the teams had had to cope with temperatures like these combined with the

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crippling humidity of the Mississippi floodplain; this time, the air was dry as the land beneath the Discoverys’ wheels – a land of of sagebrush, rattlesnakes and desert tarantulas, so jumping out of your vehicle to get under the bonnet and clean its air filter was not something to be done without caution. Having stopped along the way back in Mississippi to hob-nob with Morgan Freeman, the team were treated to another distinctly unusual overlanding experience as they passed through the Nevada town of Eureka. Some five hours north of Las Vegas, this was once a Gold Rush boom town with a population of 10,000. It’s declined to more like 600 now, leaving a strange urban landscape in which modern buildings sit alongside classic Wild West architecture – all surrounded by the harsh, parched landscape of the desert. One of the most notable buildings here is the old Opera House, which has been restored but, with no real prospect of drawing an audience, is rarely used. Not that the operagoing experience in a Gold Rush boom town would have been the genteel pastime it is today, but that’s probably just as well. In any case, Land Rover’s event organisers arranged to bring Nicolette, an opera singer from Los Angeles, to Eureka for the day to put on an intimate off-off concert for the town. Unlike quite a lot of performances in the 19th Century, it didn’t end in a riot and no-one got shot. From here, the convoy passed through the Black Rock Desert, close to where Andy Green piloted Thrust SSC to the first ever supersonic Land Speed Record in 1997. The route nibbled off a few miles from the north-east corner of California before heading into Oregon, the final state in the itinerary – but here,

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things were to get more dramatic than ever. Literally two days from the conclusion of its month-long quest, Expedition America faced a totally unexpected challenge courtesy of wildfires in the forests of Oregon which made this section of the Trans America Trail completely impassable. Completing an offtarmac crossing of the USA on tarmac doesn’t really sound like a very appropriate way to sign off, but it seemed unavoidable – or at least, it would have to lesser men than Tom Collins. Showing the resourcefulness and determination of a Camel Trophy veteran, Collins set about mapping a new route – with some expert help. ‘We give our thanks to the firefighters in Oregon who provided us with detailed advice on how to drive around the fire zone safely,’ he

said. ‘Without their assistance, we would have not been able to reach our goal.’ With that, the convoy of Discoverys – dusty, muddy and very nearly singed at the edges, but very much unbowed – rolled out of the woods and arrived at their ultimate destination of Port Orford. The westernmost point on the American mainland, this was a very fitting spot at which to finish the expedition – and the Discoverys had made it there with no mechanical issues and no repairs needed, save for a few flat tyres. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, Expedition America was able to claim the honour of having been the first to complete an unpaved crossing

of America by 4x4. It certainly demonstrated the Discovery’s overland abilities, bringing both they and the Trans America Trail to a whole new audience. If the thought of a 5000-mile expedition across the whole of the USA on almost nothing but unpaved roads, via forests, deserts and mountain ranges, sounds like your idea of heaven – well, you’re certainly not alone. Time to start prepping your Land Rover and checking out the cost of shipping, perhaps. It won’t be cheap, but it’ll be the trip of a lifetime – in every sense. And you, like Expedition America itself, will have Sam Correro to thank for it.

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The beauty behind There was a time when the idea of us running a feature about retrimming a Defender with leather, polished fixtures and soft-touch roof lining would have been laughed out of the office. But times have changed. No longer is the Defender a vehicle you use only for hacking into an off-road warhorse. Now, it’s a truck fit for turning into a heirloom vehicle – and the craftspeople at Ruskin Design have gained a go-to reputation as the experts in bringing out the beatiful best in Land Rover’s famously basic interiors Words: Mike Trott Pictures: Mike Trott and Webizzy

ot so long ago, Land Rovers possessed interiors with about as much luxury as a toilet. Sometimes, the colourways matched what you’d find inside an toilet, too, and there was very little in terms of in-car entertainment. Discoverys and Range Rovers moved on, but even the Defenders of the Td5 era could be rather drab places in which to find yourself. They can be very smart on the outside, where alloy wheels can make all the difference, but opening a door still leads you to a dull interior that’s seriously short on style. Now, we appreciate that Defenders shouldn’t be a fashion statement. But making the cabin of the car you love a more comfortable and enjoyable place to be is surely reason enough to look at interior enhancement. And if you’re going to do that, you’ll surely find yourself considering the service offered by Ruskin Design. Ruskin specialises in interiors, built to craftsman-level standards using top-quality materials, and it’s a fact that many of the boutique Defenders created by fancy brands for about a million quid will be sent here to have their cabins turned into works of art. As a Ruskin client, you find yourself in discussion with the company’s design department – part of the process by which they ascertain

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exactly what you’re after. They listen, they suggest; if you want it loud and proud, they can do that for sure, though most Defender owners prefer something a little more sympathetic. The work itself is all done by hand, and it displays no end of knowledge and experience, not to mention skill. Would it occur to you to start from the rear of the cabin and work your way forward, for example? That way, you see, it’s easier to install the uprated panels without having to keep clambering over those new leather seats. It’s not just Defenders that Ruskin focus on either, as they’ve completed work on Range Rovers and Discoverys, alongside non-Land Rover vehicles too. ‘We are totally focused on vehicle interiors,’ says Stephen Castledine, who owns Ruskin Design. ‘Our team is dedicated to perfecting the design, creation and fit of our uniquely crafted interiors, sometimes pushing the boundaries of design to create the very personal interior our

clients expect from Ruskin Design. The brand has become synonymous with luxury and quality and attracts a worldwide audience wanting a Ruskin Inside. ‘The team we have here have a real passion and flair for interior design, proven by when our newest apprentice came to me and said, “I love working here”.’ That love shows through in the work Ruskin does. As you go through the process of beautifying a Defender’s cabin on the following pages, we think you’ll see that very clearly indeed…

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the mask… 1

1: A shot of the fold-down seats in the back of the 90 before being removed and transformed into something far more glamorous. The grey tones do reappear again, but in a much better fashion 2: The seats aren’t the only part of the Defender in these pictures to go under the sewing machine, as Ruskin focus on all aspects of the cabin 3: Within the Ruskin Design studio, there are numerous processes that the team perform in order to create the very best in interior luxury, and they can cater for all tastes. For this particular 90, keeping some original characteristics was key, and its green exterior was taken into account 4: These guys are professionals at what they do and, having overseen the completion of countless projects, they have templates ready for almost anything a Defender can throw at them. Whenever the team encounters a vehicle or cabin they haven’t come across previously, they will create new designs and templates from it to add to the ever-expanding collection you see here, ready for future projects 5: It’s not just a case of fitting some fancy leather – here, the bars for the back seats have been tidied up and resprayed to make sure everything is in top condition 6: The 90’s owner wanted a more comfortable seat rather than a full-on bucket, so the foam layers were bolstered to adapt the originals 7: Initial sketches to generate ideas and develop a distinct direction for the retrim. ‘It all starts with the seats,’ is Ruskin’s wisdom. ‘You have to make everything flow to the design of the seats – they are the most expressive feature in the cabin’

8: Once the design phase is out the way and the seat covers have been created, it’s time for fitting 9: Once the rear seats have been covered, marks are placed where the holes will be made ready for the fixing brackets 10: Elsewhere, the rear door has been trimmed in leather

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11: The door cards are now leather-trimmed too, with a design which mimics the stitching from the seats 12: It’s a comprehensive process, with even the rear window surrounds receiving a new look 13: The roof lining is being revised with the change to alcantara in a silvery grey tone which, we can assure you, looks fantastic once installed on the 90. This is when the fabric was first going on following its treatment to reduce moisture. Original headlinings sag over time because they absorb moisture from the humidity in the vehicle. Ruskin, however, 100% guarantees that their headlining won’t come down during your ownership of the vehicle 14: The rear window panels are also trimmed in the same leather 15: An essential addition to any Defender but, in this case, a cubby box improved further still. The cup holders are bigger in what is a newer design, and you’ll see another bonus to this cubby further on… 16: There’s still lots more work to be done at this point, but that cubby box lid gives you a flavour of what the 90 is going to look like once the project has been concluded 17: Beginning at the rear, Ruskin’s fitters get to work on bringing back the new and improved interior fixings 18: Once the newly improved rear door card has been correctly positioned, the handle along with the finishing plaque behind the lock are secured back into place

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19: Side window panels are reinstalled before the rear seat brackets are popped back into position 20: Seatbelts follow with all the original fixings being used. The seatbelts themselves, however, are new 21: Things are starting to come together. We’re guessing this must have been taken at lunchtime…

22: Moving forwards, the front doors receive their new and enhanced look 23: The cubby box, now retrimmed in a tasteful combination of leather and alcantara, is drilled into position ready for the final few stages of assembly 24: The front seats are the last items to re-enter the cabin. They are however the standout showpiece in an interior that has been completely transformed

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ARB are the first to break cover with their accessories for the new Jimny SO WHO HAD ARB in the firstnew-Jimny-mods sweepstake, then? The Australian 4x4 accessories giant has unveiled its Project JBOX demo vehicle, sporting a range of off-road items which, while they are all still prototypes at this point in time, will become available to buy in the near future. Suzuki’s Australian importer worked with ARB by giving the company’s engineers access to a pre-launch vehicle, allowing them to start work early on developing a range of all-new and adapted accessories. In addition, ARB was able to test-fit existing products to confirm they would work on the new vehicle – and the great news for Jimny fans looking to build a serious off-roader is that these include the legendary Air-Locker. Among the new products ARB has developed for the Jimny is the smallest ever version of its Summit bull bar. This will come complete with a winch mount, which on Project JBOX has been used to house an 8000lb Warn Magnum. Underneath the vehicle is a new suspension system. ARB doesn’t quote the size of the lift it gives the Jimny, apart from to say it’s ‘suitable for a set of new muddies and improved off road ability’ – which could of course mean anything. Safe to assume, however, that it’ll be in the usual commercial range, which means it can be expected to be in the region of two inches.

Further metalwork will come in the shape of steel rock sliders and a tubular roof rack. You’d need to be doing pretty extreme stuff with a Jimny to put its sills at risk, especially after lifting its suspension, but for any sort of long-range travel a roof rack would certainly be a must-have way of overcoming the limited luggage space that’s an inevitable consequence of the vehicle’s small size – or putting the little Suzi to work. With this and the bull bar adorned with LED lighting, some underbody protection bolted on and a gear reduction transfer case mod to take care of the bigger tyres you’ll surely want, ARB is already well on the way to being able to kit out a new generation of super-Jimnys. How long before it all becomes available to buy? We don’t yet know – but it’s surely shorter than the waiting list Are you crazy about Defenders? Dotty about Discos? Does the sight of a classic Series for an actual vehicle. To keep tabs on progress, visit www.arb.com.au. I make you weak at the knees? If so, The Landy is most certainly for you! The UK’s only

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A classic Suzuki Samurai rebuilt with one of the best off-road suspension systems you’ll ever see Tested: Revised SsangYong Musso and Kia Sorento Hybrid Plus: A hard-as-nails Wrangler with the right kit for off-road dominance – and the story of a truly off-grid expedition in Central America

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