loud and proud The second-generation Range Rover is not what you'd call a common sight at playdays. When it was new, people said it was too complicated to modify… and for about two decades since it came off sale, they've been saying it's too unreliable to touch. But this one proves that with a bit of well thought out tinkering, you can turn one into an off-road weapon to reckon with… and get a bit of a street machine into the bargain Words: Gary Martin Pictures: Alan Kidd
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emember when the P38 Range Rover was new and people said they were so complicated that no-one would ever modify one for off-roading? If the answer is no, well done for being so young. But for the rest of us, the move away from the simple old engineering of the Range Rover Classic seemed to have signalled an end to any possibility of future fun and games. Then came the L322, and then the L405, and whatever the new one is called, and now it’s the P38 that looks like a simple old truck. A simple old truck with fearsomely complicated and infamously temperamental electronics all over it, of course, but the basic engineering is still as traditional as they come. It has axles. It has a chassis. It has a transfer case. Those electronics might hate you, but the good mechanical stuff is all there too.
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Despite this, you don’t see many people modifying P38s. Even the similarlyish old Discovery 2, itself hardly common in the off-road world, gets more love than the second-gen Range Rover. The TD5 engine may of course have something to do with that, though, because the BMW unit in the Rangey screams and runs away at the first sign of a rice pudding with a skin on it. Now that these are old trucks and you’re more likely to use them as occasional playthings than everyday mile munchers, however, perhaps it’s the V8 options that are more relevant. Especially with the price gap between the two fuels growing faster than your weekly shopping bill. The Discovery 2 had the 4.0-litre V8, as did the Range Rover, and it was a fairly underwhelming old lump in both. But up at the top of the Rangey line-up, the prehistoric Rover V8 had been pushed to 4.6 litres.
This is where things started getting interesting. In factory form, the first-generation ‘GEMS’ version of the 4.6 put out 221bhp and 280lbf.ft and consumed an average of about 17mpg. Not exactly a world-beating amount of power per pint, then. It was plenty smooth and refined, though, just like the rest of the vehicle. It was quiet, too. Which is where Steve Smale’s P38 comes in. This is less modified than it might look at first glance. But quiet, it’s not. Incredibly, the exhaust is still quite standard. It follows the same two-into-one-into-two pattern as the original. But let’s just say there are less baffles than there once was. It’s still entirely legal – a clean bill of health from several MOT tests down the years attests to that – but it’s also entirely lovely. There’s a wonderful deep-throated rumble when he fires it up, rising to a purposeful bellow as the revs climb under load. If the average car
4x4 15/12/2022 22:24
