SOMETHING IN
Ian Grayston was only after a family car when, may years ago, he bought a new whole new world of driving fun – one in which he went on to create a 90 whose works of 4x4 engineering in the country at the time Words: Gary Noskill Pictures: Steve Taylor
B
ack when the original Discovery was new, Land Rover marketed it as a vehicle the whole family could go out in at the weekend and get muddy. It was a moderately fanciful image for what was, to most people, just the latest thing in cool cars, but if you were to go to an off-road playday in the early 1990s you would indeed find people doing it in the family Disco.
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When Ian Grayston bought his 200Tdi Discovery way back when they were new, it was indeed just a car to him. But he wasn’t the kind of person to leave its ability unexplored for long. ‘As time went on,’ he says, ‘and I had a play with it, I became amazed at what it could do.’ As did so many people at the time. But there was a problem. As there was for so many people at the time, etc. ‘It was too expen-
sive to be giving a really severe test. So I bought myself a Series IIA. I was soon hooked.’ Those were the days when a 200Tdi Disco was worth about ten times as much as a good Series IIA. It’s the other way round now, of course but this was then. At the time, Ian had access to some private land on a railway siding where he could get the IIA flexing its cart springs. But of course there’s
4x4 11/04/2023 17:02
