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Man Maths: Range Rover Sport
3 months ago
You don't need to go halfway around the world for a great media launch
Oh yes, and we also slithered around Land Rover’s off-roading crucible at Eastnor Castle, thundered along a genuine forest rally stage in deepest Wales and crawled into, along and out of a Boeing 747 at Kemble Airfield. Little wonder those couple of days have stayed with me.
I’m still not altogether sure what the point of the disembowelled Jumbo Jet was, but the rest of it made for the most thorough assessment of a new car someone in my line of work could hope for. And at the end of it, I was really quite taken with the Sport. I actually thought it preferable to its larger sibling at the time – still luxurious, still great in the mud, but more athletic on those winding roads.
Not anymore. I later came to realise the Sport didn’t give up just a little ride comfort and noise suppression in its bid to be more dynamic than the full-fat Range Rover, but huge amounts of both. Enough, indeed, that it’s the bigger car I most covet today. Even so, that generation of Range Rover Sport remains a very capable machine and the earliest examples can be found today for less than £10,000.
Spend another five grand and you’ll get a car with around 80,000 miles behind it and a full history. It’ll have what was the base engine at launch, but that’s still a 3-litre turbodiesel V6 good for almost 300bhp. I’m not going to make any bold claims about how reliable a car like that might prove to be – there are plenty of horror stories, no question – but in a lighter colour on the smaller wheels, it’s a handsome machine that won’t necessarily make you look like you earn a living in the distribution of fine powders.
You will have to make do with a woeful infotainment system, but you can’t have it all. For a car as broadly defined at this, £15,000 does seem very reasonable indeed. And if it’s helpful, I can give you my cast-iron guarantee that it will fit inside the upper deck of a 747.
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