The news wasn’t exactly welcomed by all who worked behind the gates at Land Rover’s plant in Solihull. Many reckoned an off-roader with a touch of class was against the company’s no-frills principles, while others said there’d be no market for it. Yet, against all odds, a small team of engineers and designers who did believe in the new model worked tirelessly around the clock to produce the vehicle that was to become – and remains – a world leader.
What a shock it was, back in 1970, when a fire-breathing V8 4×4 with coil springs and disc brakes all round was released onto the market. This, remember, was a pre-decimalisation time when we carried pounds, shillings and pence in our pockets. Morris Minors and original Volkswagen Beetles were still being manufactured. The last steam trains on British Rail had only been taken out of service two years earlier. The arrival of the Range Rover on our roads was as startling a sight as a Martian knocking on your front door.
At Land Rover, nobody was really sure who the original Range Rover should be aimed at. So in the best tradition of Land Rover’s famed versatility, they steered it towards farmers and provided an easy-clean interior that included rubber mats and vinyl seats. Rover had been working on a larger version of the Land Rover for several years. Back in the early 1950s, Rover engineer Gordon Bashford headed up a project to develop a so-called ‘Road Rover’, but despite reaching prototype stage it was axed in 1958. It wasn’t until 1966 that Bashford and fellow Rover engineer Spen King began work on a new model.
Charles Spencer King – better known by his nickname, Spen – was the nephew of the Wilks brothers. Born in 1925, he left school in 1942 and initially joined Rolls-Royce as an engineering apprentice. But in 1945 he joined Rover and, in 1959, became chief engineer of new vehicle projects. He helped develop the P6 and 2000 Rover saloon cars before his greatest achievement of all: the Range Rover. He died in 2010, aged 85, in a cycling accident near his Warwickshire home.
Spen King is acknowledged to be the godfather of the Range Rover. In the late 1960s Spen was senior project engineer and led the team that devised, designed and produced the vehicle that redefined 4×4 vehicles and which became the benchmark for the legions of SUVs to follow. Within a year they had created a prototype, and by 1969 the design was complete. Work began on a batch of 26 engineering development prototypes, which were badged ‘Velar’ as a decoy for when they were spotted during road tests.
They were certainly eye-catching. The new Range Rover was unlike anything that had gone before, and, after its launch in 1970, the Louvre museum in Paris exhibited one as an ‘exemplary work of industrial design’.
It is often said that the Range Rover was the company’s answer to the customers who had requested a bit of luxury. But don’t for one moment think that this new model was upmarket. There were no carpets and the seats were covered in vinyl – all the better for hosing out the mud. The dashboards were plastic, there was no air con, nor power steering. Only a two-door version was available. All the luxury stuff was to come much later, but at the time it was the ultimate countryside vehicle, with unparalleled on- and off-road performance, thanks to long-travel coil springs, disc brakes all round and the legendary Rover 3.5-litre V8 (actually a 1950s American design, developed by the US manufacturer Buick, but bought by Rover).
However, demand was so great for this car that there was soon a lengthy waiting list of prospective buyers, and for several months after its launch secondhand models were appreciating in value and, when sold, often fetched more than new ones!
Improvements to this model were gradual, due to a lack of funding from the parent company (British Leyland) rather than lack of ambition by the frustrated Rover bosses. In 1975 the whole strike-prone shooting match was effectively nationalised and once-proud marques began to sink without a trace. Land Rover could have so easily disappeared, too, had not fate stepped in. As part of the restructuring of BL in 1978, Land Rover was granted autonomy. Four years later, with the demise of Morris cars, Rover car production was moved to Cowley, Oxford, and the Solihull site was devoted exclusively to 4×4s.
From the very start, the Range Rover had proved that its off-road credentials were a match for its illustrious Land Rover stablemates. The original Range Rover remained in production until 1996, although for the last two years of its life it was re-badged as the Range Rover Classic, to avoid confusion with the second-generation Range Rover that had been launched in 1994. It was as though Land Rover, having enjoyed such huge success with the original Range Rover, was reluctant to let it go, but at the same time it didn’t want the presence of the old model to harm the sales of the new one, so only a restricted range of Classic variants was made available. Bizarrely, the cheapest variants of the second-generation Range Rover were actually cheaper than the top-end Classics.
At the time, Land Rover said that production of the Range Rover Classic would continue as long as there was a demand, but that demand fairly quickly diminished. The final production run, in the autumn of 1995, was a batch of 25 right-hand-drive 25th-anniversary models finished in Oxford Blue metallic, with retro chrome bumpers and beige leather upholstery, Freestyle Choice wheels with Goodyear Wrangler tyres, a CD player and special badges. The Range Rover had been in production for over 25 years and over 300,000 had been built in that time.
The Range Rover transformed the fortunes of Land Rover, and its success became key to the evolution of the Defender itself.
CHAPTER THREE
I was once in a riot.
I told this story to a GQ journalist. The Daily Mail decided it was too good to be true and printed a claim that I had lied. Their lawyers insisted I provide proof that it happened, which I did. They printed the story questioning my account anyway. So, for the record, I shall tell it again. And I can assure you it is true.
We were holed up in a Northern Irish village. It was a slightly depressing-looking place with a small shop, a church, a pub and row upon row of terraced two-up two-down homes. A few battered Ford Cortinas and Escorts cruised the largely deserted streets, and on the outskirts of town was an army barracks.
We were drinking in a pub when a Snatch Land Rover arrived. Heavily armed soldiers stormed the pub and suddenly grabbed my mate, and before we knew what had happened, he had been spirited away in their armoured vehicle. Things escalated pretty quickly after that and suddenly I was in the midst of a full riot. Petrol bombs were being thrown as the sleep-deprived soldiers approached us, riot shields and batons at the ready.
We threw objects, hollered and heckled. It’s amazing what adrenaline can do to courage, and before I could stop myself I was at the front of the crowd, kicking and grabbing at their riot shields. Somehow I managed to leverage a shield from one of the soldiers. I didn’t think about the baton in his other hand which was soon falling forcefully onto the bridge of my nose.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, was how I first broke my nose. In a riot.
Of course, it wasn’t quite what it seemed. We were in fact in Longmoor Military Camp in Hampshire in a mock Northern Irish village as ‘actors’ testing new recruits to the army. We were there as fictional residents of the village and the scenario had slowly escalated to a full ‘controlled’, or in my case ‘partly controlled’, riot.
To be fair to the soldiers, we had given them hell by keeping them awake all night by running metal rods up and down the corrugated wall around their barracks, and we had been warned we would get as good as we gave.
I found myself in an ambulance. (An interesting aside; I met a beautiful blonde ‘rioter’ called Lindsey that night and we ended