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

Back 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.

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