Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2019 i Land Rover Monthly

SV Coupe scoops award FOR THE second year running, the Interior Design 2018 Best of Year Awards included an automotive category, and it was the limited edition Range Rover SV Coupe that took top honours in the Overall Design class. Paying tribute to the original two-door Range Rover, it’s not the first award picked up by this highly-bespoke vehicle, but it comes at a price! Jaguar Land Rover confirms 4500 job cuts FOLLOWING SPECULATION in the last issue that Jaguar Land Rover was to axe thousands of jobs the car maker has now confirmed it is reducing its global workforce by around 4500 people. This is in addition to the 1500 people who left the business in 2018. In what seems like an effort to put a positive spin on…

Drilling danger I’VE JUST read Trevor Cuthbert’s article on replacing the in-tank fuel pump on a Defender Td5 (page 128, February LRM). It’s an interesting and useful article, especially as it provides the all-important dimensions for cutting the access hatch to get to the fuel pump. However, as a Td5 Defender owner myself, I have a major warning to anyone following the steps taken to actually cut out the square. Trevor points out the risks of drilling into the fuel tank, but I’m afraid he understates the likelihood of drilling right into – and possibly right through – the wall of the fuel tank. Remember, the Td5’s fuel tank is just blow-moulded polythene, which is soft and, believe you me, is very easy to puncture with a drill. The hazard…

OME SPRINGS PRICE: £187.50 CONTACT: britpart.com ARB’s STRONG and durable Old Man Emu springs for Defenders are made from micro-alloyed spring steel. Can be used with lifts of up to 50 mm. Available for normal, medium and heavy (500 kg) loads. FILTER CLASP PRICE: £9.99 CONTACT: britpart.com THIS FUEL filter clasp kit is to repair the fuel filter clamp casings on a Defender. Quick and simple repair job. DOOR THRESHERS PRICE: FROM £59.50 CONTACT: britpart.com ONE OF the quickest ways to freshen up the inside of a Defender or Series Land Rover is to replace the tired door threshers with these stainless steel ones. Will line up with all the existing sill holes. Includes all the fixings you need. HEAD TORCH PRICE: £35.20 CONTACT: britpart.com THE ZOOM 240 is not…

I’M IN Iraqi Kurdistan, trying to write a story about a network of smugglers who, for decades, have carried goods over the border into Iran. During decades of sanctions imposed on Iran, almost every conceivable item apparently made its way across this several-hundred-kilometre stretch of border. Along with alcohol, western cigarettes, army boots and fancy frocks, the automotive industry also featured heavily. Entire cars were driven directly across areas navigable by vehicles, and replacement automotive parts – a particular bane under sanctions, as Land Rover owners could well imagine – were transported across this mountainous region by pack-horses and foot couriers. These couriers are poverty-stricken Iranian Kurds who carry up to 50 kilos of goods on their back across tough mountainous terrain laced with mines, running the risk of being…

SO YOU want to buy a Land Rover? We’ve got good news and bad news. First the bad news: There has never been a more difficult time to decide which Land Rover to buy. Brexit, a weak pound and uncertainty over the future of diesel engines have all left would-be buyers bewildered and undecided. But don’t despair. The good news is that there has never been a better choice of brilliant secondhand Land Rovers. And the even better news is that we have assembled the finest team of experts in the industry to guide you through the minefield and help you make an informed choice So, without further ado, let’s look at our panel’s top ten . . . FREELANDER 2 WITH Defenders and Series models fetching silly money, Freelander…

■ APRIL/MAY 2017: New hydraulic lifters and push rods, composite inlet and head gaskets; rocker covers painted; new spark plugs; secondhand battery cover (original missing); secondhand air box; secondhand radiator fan; K&N air filter; new spark plug leads supports; new air-con radiator; new automatic transmission cooler; new drop arm complete with new ball joints; reconditioned power steering box; new track control arm complete with ball joints; auto box oil change (plus new filter and gasket); engine and front and rear axle oil changes; new driver’s door internal handle opening cable; re-con alternator; wheel spacer; pollen filters; secondhand front seat belts (both sides); new key remote housing and battery; fuel filter; air con re-gassed; wheels aligned; front bumper removed and stainless fixing bolts fitted. ■ MAY 15, 2017: Passed MoT (129,652…

February 8 – 10 ■ India – Land Rover, The Above & Beyond Tour Kochi, Kerala landrover.in/experiences/landrover-experience February 9 ■ Northern Ireland Land Rover Club, SAE Off-road Event Catcairn, Co Antrim landrover-club.com February 9 – 10 ■ North East Rover Owners Club, CCV and RTV Trial West Woodburn, Hexham nero.org.uk ■ 4x4 Adventure Tours, Wiltshire Downs 4x4 Tour Wiltshire and North Dorset adventuretours.co.uk ■ The Great Western Classic Car Show Royal Bath & West Showground, Shepton Mallet bristolclassiccarshows.com February 9 – 18 ■ USA – Chicago Auto Show Mccormick Place, Chicago chicagoautoshow.com February 10 ■ Cornwall and Devon LRC, CCV Trial Exeter, Devon cdlrc.com ■ Leicestershire & Rutland LRC, CCV Trial Eaton, Melton Mowbray…

In recent years the Welsh Xtrem has gained a name for itself as being the toughest, if not most-demanding, 4x4 winch challenge event that takes place in the UK. Once again, entries are already full this year, and the reserve list of teams wanting to take part is almost as long. The event takes place at the Pit, Cynheidre, Llanelli, March 8 – 10. It starts with night sections on the Friday evening, followed by a full day's competition on Saturday with more sections on Sunday, finishing at 4.00 pm. Proceeds from the Welsh Xtrem are given to charity, and to date the event has raised in excess of £31,500. Impressive stuff. Details of the event and how you can be part of the Welsh Xtrem as an event marshal…

PATRICK CRUYWAGEN EDITOR 1998 Defender 110 2.8 TREVOR CUTHBERT CONTRIBUTOR 1957 Series 86in 1960 Series II 88in 1983 One Ten HCPU 1987 130 Double Cab HCPU 1988 Range Rover 4.0 automatic 1990 88in coil-sprung V8 hybrid 1992 Defender 90 200 Tdi 1993 Defender 110 Tipper 1993 Defender 130 Cherry Picker 1994 Defender 110 300 Tdi soft-top 2002 Discovery 2 Td5 Adventurer 2005 Defender 90 Td5 hard-top DAVE BARKER CONTRIBUTOR Discovery 4, Freelander 2 XS Defender 90, Series I ED EVANS TECHNICAL EDITOR 1976 Series III 88 soft-top 1989 Ninety Station Wagon 1998 Discovery 300Tdi 2000 Freelander 1 L-series 2000 Defender 110 Td5 2006 Range Rover Sport TDV6…

I once owned only one vehicle: a Ford Anglia that was forever breaking down. The answer to that problem was to buy another old banger so I had two cars, instantly doubling my chances of having at least one vehicle in working order at any given time. It also doubled the amount of fixing I had to do, but I enjoyed that, so I kept on buying more cars, and have done ever since. It’s a logical philosophy made unnecessarily expensive by having to pay road tax on every car I own. For us multiple car owners, road tax is not a tax on using the roads, it’s a tax on owning a car. After all, I can only drive one of my Land Rovers at any one time, so…

IT’S ALWAYS been my intention to give this vehicle a distinctive appearance, especially when viewed from the front. There are plenty of optional grilles on the market, many of which are too modern and bling for this 30-year-old machine, and there are many different finishes available on the standard grille that work extremely well, but aren’t sufficiently unique for what I had in mind. Although wanting the Ninety to look different, I still wanted it to look classic and not lose its late Eighties character. I considered Britpart’s Classic grille and the Land Rover Heritage grille, but they weren’t the grille that was in my head. It had to be subtle, and it would be great to give a nod to the Series III Stage 1 V8 model whose mesh…

Jon’s tips for keeping your Land Rover safe include: ■ Never leave your keys in the ignition, even if you’re only out of your Land Rover for a few seconds, as that’s all it takes for a thief to take it. ■ Get your car windows etched with the registration number – and your postcode if you plan to keep to keep the vehicle for many years. ■ Fit a lockable steel cover for your steering wheel, plus a pedal lock. ■ Fit an immobiliser switch hidden in a safe place. ■ Fit a dummy flashing red light. ■ Fit a handbrake lock. ■ Consider investing in a decent tracking system. ■ Install a lockable driveway post, set in a cubic metre of concrete. “Keyless ignition on modern Land Rovers…

IN YOUR January 2019 issue, Gary Pusey wrote that Prof. Dr. Speth had to speak up because a ‘hard Brexit’ could destroy Land Rover, referring to the 25 million components that had to be sourced from third party suppliers. The uncertainty could kill the company. One of the most certain events in life is that politicians will always, always, milk a crisis until the very end, to get free publicity and to look like heroes. It’s also a certainty that politicians disdain the voice of the people because (in their view) politicians are, of course, smarter in every way (and not because they get kickbacks and special favours when they fight commoner things like Brexit, which infringe giant global financial interests). So either Speth is so looney that he needs…

APART FROM the Wilks family, the most powerful man at Land Rover in the early days was Tom Barton: the legendary engineer who turned Maurice Wilks’ vision for a Jeep-like 4x4 into reality. It is often said that the original Land Rover was little more than a Jeep copy, but in fact it was much better than the ubiquitous American military truck, thanks to Barton’s insistence on peerless engineering. In doing so he laid the foundations for the marque’s enduring success story. Ever since 1948, every Land Rover ever built has been deliberately over-engineered, in order to ensure that it was tough enough to withstand any off-road challenge. It has become part of Land Rover’s DNA and that is why Land Rover became Britain’s most successful motor manufacturer. In Tom…

SUMMER HAS well and truly arrived in Australia. As I lovingly craft this column, it is a sweltering 40 degrees Celsius. It is so hot in fact, I have had to put the roof back on my 109 because when stopped at traffic lights, the heat was unbearable and neither myself nor Land Rover could function properly! One of the biggest hazards is the black vinyl seats. In these temperatures, they become hot plates and the backs of my legs are both burnt. I also received near third-degree burns to my left hand from the gear knob! With these extremes I think Australia would be a good place to put the new Defender through its paces (Land Rover Australia – you have a willing tester here). So with scorching temperatures,…

PHIL BASHALL Dunsfold Collection ALISDAIR CUSICK LRM photographer RUSSELL DYKES Ardent Adventures SIMON BUCK Devon 4x4 GARY PUSEY LRM Columnist PATRICK CRUYWAGEN LRM Editor ED EVANS LRM Technical Editor DAVE BARKER LRM club guru STEVE MILLER LRM Advertising Manager PAUL MYERS Britpart MD ANDREW HARRISONSMITH Nene Overland RICHARD HALL LRM Contributor TREVOR CUTHBERT LRM Contributor…

LIKE MANY clubs around the country, the Suffolk Land Rover Owners’ Club runs regular competitions between its members and other clubs; however the club also has many activities aimed at improving the skills of its membership and promoting the club to a wider audience. With respect to training, the club runs internal courses for juniors and new members to experience vehicle handling at the club’s site at Newbourne. These days prove very popular and even attract members wishing for a refresher of their existing skills. Now obviously running a site such as Newbourne requires SLROC to have trained marshals who all undergo a bi-annual training course. A by-product of which is general exposure to the use of winches for both self-recovery and the recovery of stranded vehicles. Many Land Rovers…

The Land Rover Spring Adventure show returns to the Driffield Showground in East Yorkshire on the weekend of May 25 – 26. The show will feature all the regular attractions that made this event a firm favourite with all Land Rover enthusiasts, from clubs to families. This year will feature the Flatdog twist-off ramp, an arena parade by Land Rover clubs of their members' vehicles, and more. A plethora of industry stands will be exhibiting, plus autojumble stands a-plenty so you can try and hunt down that elusive Land Rover part. And for the rest of the family there will be kids' attractions and much more. Further details and information on advance admission and weekend camping passes, plus how to book a club stand can be found on the show's…

JAGUAR LAND Rover has just released an amazing new film and while it charts its first electric car – the Jaguar I-PACE – if you are interested in the company’s journey towards electrification, then it’s very interesting. Check it out on Vimeo on Demand – available to rent for £2.35, or to buy for £7.86: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/169870. ‘Jaguar: Going Electric’, directed by award-winning filmmaker Ben Lawrie and narrated by Mark Strong, gives you exclusive access to Jaguar’s state-of-the-art engineering laboratories and top-secret design studios, with insight from JLR design chief Ian Callum. With the car maker saying it wants to have electrified versions of all its models by 2022, it is fascinating to see how it is embracing the biggest change in the automotive industry for the past 100 years. The…

A RANGE Rover Sport less than three years old and belonging to Olympian swimmer Sharon Davies burst into flames outside her house in Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire. The 56-year-old BBC pundit shared a picture of her burnt-out Range Rover on Twitter and wrote: “Trying to get hold of Land Rover. This is what’s left of my car! Firemen say electrical fault.” While she praised emergency services, she was less than impressed with the customer service she experienced from Jaguar Land Rover. A spokesperson for the firm confirmed on New Year’s Day that ‘it was involved in a thermal incident but the cause is unknown and it will be comprehensively reviewed by Land Rover technicians’.…

WE HAVE a few weeks to wait until JLR releases its financial results for the third quarter, which covers the period from October to December 2018. But we already know what the main cause of the inevitable pain will be: China. Plummeting sales in China have figured prominently in the swing from a quarterly profit of £364m in March to a loss of £264m three months later. The company took serious action and managed to stem the bleeding to the extent that the loss by the end of September was reduced to £90m for the quarter. And that’s when the big cost-cutting programme was announced. The company’s bosses must be hoping that December’s figures will have returned the business to profitability, but at what cost? “The company’s bosses must be…

IN ONE fell swoop – or maybe that should read ‘one complete roll-over’ – HRH Prince Philip has raised the global profile of the Freelander 2 more than any number of features in Land Rover magazines. When he had his infamous accident just outside the Sandringham estate, he proved to the world that a 97-year-old driver can get T-boned in a Freelander 2 and still walk away uninjured (even if most of the world did think he was in a Range Rover). To the slightly more knowledgeable Land Rover enthusiast, the most surprising thing about Prince Philip’s accident was that he was driving a Freelander 2 rather than the latest luxury product from JLR. The Freelander went out of production in 2014, and yet HRH seems so taken with them…

ONE OF my customers rang me in a bit of a panic: the dipped beam headlights on his 1996 Defender had stopped working. Sidelights and main beam were working fine. He had changed the dip switch on the steering column but to no effect. Could I take a look before it got dark? A bit of probing with a multimeter soon established the cause. Defenders of this era were fitted with dim-dip, a now obsolete ancestor of today’s Daytime Running Lights. The system illuminated the headlight bulbs at reduced brightness when the sidelights were switched on with the engine running. The idea was to make vehicles more visible in poor conditions. On a Defender the system is operated through a bright red relay behind the instrument panel. If this fails…

AFTER THE first hill rally in May 1971, the late author and broadcaster Michael Frostick concluded his narration of the BBC2 Wheelbase film with the words “We’ve been at the birth of a new form of motorsport, and although mother and child had a rather rough night, they’re looking forward to a very exciting future”. He was certainly right in terms of the ‘rough night’ although he could have better described it as a ‘rough nine months’ because the work involved in bringing that first-ever hill rally to fruition had been complicated, difficult and time-consuming, and often painful. Although there were many willing volunteers to assist, it is unlikely it would ever have happened without the efforts of one man: Roger Fell. Roger’s passion for travel and adventure in a…

Established over 20 years ago the Suffolk Land Rover Owners club holds competitive events throughout the year, including tyro trials and driving and training days mostly at the clubs own off-road site at Newbourne. The club also attends many shows both nationally and local and raises funds for charities which are nominated by club members. This year the nominated charities are Parkinson UK and Bikeactive. The club has around 300 members who are kept informed of all club activities by the its monthly newsletter Nooze, along with its website and Facebook pages. For more information check out the website: slroc.uk.com…

The 4x4 Expo is described as the “biggest, busiest and best indoor 4x4 show in the UK”. And if you are a building, modifying, preparing or just maintaining your 4x4 then it’s the show for you and should not be missed. 4x4 Expo takes place on Sunday February 24 at the Stafford Showground, with doors opening at 9.30 am. Tickets are £8 in advance or £10 on the door. Details of online advance ticket sales and a list of trade and club stands can be found on the event's website and further information can be also found on its Facebook pages. donington4x4show.co.uk…

DAVE PHILLIPS CONTRIBUTOR 1996 Discovery 300Tdi 1984 Ninety 300Tdi MARK WILLIAMS CONTRIBUTOR 2005 Freelander 1 TD4 HSE Station Wagon STEVE MILLER CONTRIBUTOR 2007 Discovery 3, 1985 Ninety 1998 Discovery 300Tdi TIM HAMMOND CONTRIBUTOR 1991 Range Rover Classic 300Tdi 1987 Range Rover Classic 3.5 EFI V8 1986 Range Rover Classic 300Tdi 1984 Range Rover Classic 3.5 V8 1984 Range Rover Classic 3.5 V8 1982 Range Rover Classic 3.5 V8 1982 Range Rover Classic 3.5 V8 1989 Land Rover Discovery 200Tdi ALISDAIR CUSICK CONTRIBUTOR 1995 Range Rover Classic 1957 Series I…

• When working under a vehicle, ensure it is securely located on a flat firm floor and prevent from rolling by applying the park brake, engaging a gear or using wheel chocks, or a combination of these. Keep the keys with you so no-one can inadvertently start the car. • Before working on a raised vehicle, or where a wheel has been removed, ensure the chassis is firmly and stably supported on suitably rated axle stands and that additional back-up supports (such as a wheel of further stands) are placed underneath. • Wear gloves or barrier cream to protect the skin from oils, and protective gloves when drilling and cutting. • Wear eye protection when working on overhead parts or using a drill/angle grinder. • Consider appropriate posture and stance…

SERIES III 88” AND 109”, 1971 TO 1985 SERIES IIIs aren't the cheap and cheerful entry-level Land Rovers they used to be, but you can still find sensibly-priced restoration projects. SIIIs make affordable everyday motors, as parts are reasonably priced and readily available. The simplicity of the design makes them ideal for the home mechanic. Tidy originals command higher prices. The Stage One V8 is particularly sought-after. Look after your Series III and it will hold its value. Diesels sluggish. BUYER’S TIP: Definitely worth investing in one. SPECIFICATIONS: 1971-1985: 2.25 petrol/diesel and transmissions as Series IIA, 2.6 six-cylinder produced up to 1979. 1979-1985: Stage One (109 only) 3.5-litre V8 petrol, 91 bhp, 166 lb-ft torque. LT95 four-speed manual with permanent 4WD. PRICE GUIDE: Poor: £800 – £1900 Average: £1900 –…