Hardcore P38 A Mk2 Range Rover built for playdays but still near-standard

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

Remember 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.

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 fi rst 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 fi rst-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 refi ned, though, just like the rest of the vehicle.

It was quiet, too. Which is where Steve Smale’s P38 comes in. This is less modifi ed than it might look at fi rst 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 baffl es 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 fi res it up, rising to a purposeful bellow as the revs climb under load. If the average car

nut were to hear it before they see it, they’d most likely expect the noise to be coming from either a latter-day muscle car or a hot rod.

And that’s just when you’re following him around on the road. When he’s booting it up a near-vertical hill at Devil’s Pit, which just happens to be a few miles away from him… well, you can just imagine how all hell breaks loose.

As we said, though, this is not a heavily modified vehicle. It’s still on air suspension, believe it or not. It’s riding on 265/75R16 Malatese Kobras – a sensible mud-terrain remould, and hardly overly huge, albeit plenty taller than the vehicle was built to take. He says it rubs a little on its lowest height setting, the answer being… to not use it on its lowest height setting. Duh. And on full height, it works a treat.

He admits to having popped a suspension air bag once when a full-on assault on a very uneven hill resulted in a wheel coming back down to earth with a heftier than normal crash. And the old-school traction control means a set of brake pads is doing well to last half a dozen playdays. On that subject, the heavy clay mud of Devil’s Pit means the vehicle is currently enjoying life with a brand new radiator. But ultimately, Steve says, it does its thing very well and more reliably than you might think.

A pair of heavy-duty bumpers is pretty much as far as the mods go, which just shows how little you need to do to turn a posh old gin palace into a playday animal with a mouth like Johnny Rotten. The one at the back took three blokes to lift it into place, and it's not the heavy one…

Going back to the mods, there are heavy-duty bumpers at both ends and a similarly solid steering guard underneath. And, er, that’s it. Well, the air-con has been removed, because it had given up the ghost and he wasn’t going to keep anything that wasn’t working for its living. But as we said, this is a surprisingly standard vehicle.

Those bumpers, though. When we say ‘heavy-duty’, we’re not joking. Steve tells us that it took three blokes to lift the back on into place. And it’s not the one with the winch tray…

He doesn’t know where they came from (he bought the vehicle more or less as it is) but it looks like a fabricator’s special rather than something from a production line as the tray doesn’t have any mounting holes or even a slot for a fairlead. It’s a case of doing your own marking and cutting to suit the winch in question, which wouldn’t be a fi ve minute job. As it is, Steve’s never bothered with a winch for the simple reason that you don’t need one for playdays.

And anyway, he’s normally the one pulling other people out. Normally, though not always. He mentions that someone in a Trooper tried to rescue him on one occasion and ended up killing his own vehicle in the process. The P38 was never less than a heavy old lump, and bolting several hundred pounds of steel to each end is only ever going to take that one way.

Not that getting stuck has ever been a common occurrence for this vehicle. Nor has breaking down, despite the P38’s fearsome reputation – it throws the occasional code, and of course a steady diet of off-roading is always going to mean an enhanced maintenance schedule (especially when it’s done in a village called Barton-le-Clay…), but mainly if there’s a pain point in the story it involves the amount of fuel it takes to keep the V8 happy. Steve talks of a trip he made once to Tixover for an off-road day, and how much it cost…

But you know what, even at something like a pound per mile we just know he came back with a smile on his face. How could you not, after all, in a big old barge like this that's the very defi nition of growing old disgracefully?

Take some tyres, add some heavy steel and a rude exhaust, pour in a load of petrol and be happy. And they said the P38 was complicated.

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These days, there are 1.0-litre engines that make more power than the biggest version of the Rover V8 used to. Safe to say the 4.6 HSE the biggest version of the Rover V8 used to. Safe to say the 4.6 HSE was better at drinking petrol than it was at turning it into forward motion. It was plenty smooth, though – and as it turns out, when you fetch all the baffl es out of the exhaust it makes an absolutely lovely noise

Steve's Range Rover has been modifi ed a lot less than you might think to look at it. And in the cabin, it actually looks as if it's ageing quite elegantly. You'd never believe that this was the inside of a 4x4 that's been hammered around Tixover and Devil's Pit