Range Rover First Generation

The Complete Story

James Taylor

• Publisher: Crowood
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781785004124
• Topic: Tecnologia e ingegneria
• Subtopic: Trasporti e ingegneria automobilistica

The Range Rover's designers intended it to be a more comfortable and road-friendly passenger-carrying Land Rover, but customers quickly saw something much more in it. During the 1970s, while its immense practicality and capability were appreciated and acknowledged, a Range Rover became a sought-after and prestigious possession. It went on to change the face of Land Rover for ever. Range Rover First Generation - The Complete Story delves into the real story of the Range Rover, examining what lay behind the multiple changes in its twenty-six years of production. The book covers the full development story; custom and utility conversions; Range Rovers for the US market; full technical specifications and Range Rovers assembled overseas. If ever a car deserved the over-used epithet 'iconic', the first-generation Range Rover is it. The book provides an insight into the little-known difficulties and problems that were so well concealed by the Range Rover's makers and is a must read for all Range Rover and Land Rover enthusiasts. Superbly illustrated with 223 colour and 97 black & white photographs.

CHAPTER ONE

ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT

There is no denying that the very name of Range Rover has a powerful appeal, suggesting an ability to travel at will over wide open spaces. But the car that became the Range Rover started out with a much humbler name. In fact, when first proposed during 1965, it was just another Land Rover.

The Land Rover, introduced in 1948, had become a huge success for the Rover Company that made it, rapidly overtaking its traditional saloon cars as the best-selling product. During the 1950s it became the foundation of the business, although Rover people still tended to think of themselves as a car company first and foremost, with a profitable sideline in light commercial vehicles.

One group of Rover employees who were more aware of the truth than most was the Sales Department, and by the turn of the 1960s they were beginning to pile on the pressure for a related product line to sell alongside the Land Rover. The cars side of the business had two models – the P4 and P5 Rover saloons – so why should the Land Rover side not have the same? Several ideas were put forwards, ranging from bigger Land Rovers that were more like small trucks, down to minimalist economy models, but none had progressed beyond the prototype stage. Except, that is, for a long-wheelbase Forward Control model introduced in 1962, and that was a slow seller.

A BRIGHT IDEA

Against this background, it is not surprising that one of Rover’s more fertile minds came up with a new idea. Spen King – Charles Spencer King – was a nephew of Rover’s Chairman Maurice Wilks, and of its former Chairman Spencer Wilks, the brothers who had guided Rover’s fortunes since the 1930s. He had joined Rover to work on gas turbine engines after an apprenticeship at Rolls-Royce, and had gone on to have significant input into the revolutionary new Rover saloon that was introduced as the Rover 2000 (known internally as P6) in 1963. He had since become head of Rover’s think-tank department, called New Vehicle Projects, whose job was to develop new ideas that might one day become new products. New Vehicle Projects was quite independent of the mainstream Engineering Department, which gave it greater freedom to innovate.

Spen King is often described as a very serious and boffin-like individual, but he also had a great sense of fun. Here he is in 1966 at Eastnor, clearly enjoying the opportunity to take photographs from the bonnet of a 109-inch Land Rover Station Wagon.

The Rover 2000 was introduced in 1963 and featured long-travel coil-spring suspension. Spen King realized that this would work on a Land Rover, too.

King reasoned that it should be possible to improve on the traditionally harsh ride characteristics of the Land Rover by using softer suspension with long-travel coil springs in place of the leaf springs that had been standard since 1948. He proved it to his own satisfaction by driving a Rover 2000 – which had such springs – across a rough-surfaced field. And from that simple thought came the idea that long-travel coil springs might form the basis of a much more comfortable passenger-carrying Land Rover – the sort of model that was then thought of as a Land Rover Station Wagon.

The next stage was to share these ideas with two of his colleagues. One was Peter Wilks, Rover’s Technical Director and another nephew of the Wilks brothers; he and King were cousins. The other was Gordon Bashford, the chassis designer on the New Vehicle Projects team who had been responsible for the chassis and suspension designs of every new Rover car since the 1930s. Peter Wilks could see the potential in King’s idea, and agreed that he should spend some time developing it. So King and Bashford set to work on preliminary layout drawings, ending up with a five-seater passenger-carrying Land Rover that would combine all the rough-terrain ability of a Land Rover with the comfortable ride and modern driving dynamics of the latest Rover cars.

A key innovation in these preliminary drawings was the incorporation of disc brakes. The Rover 2000 had disc brakes all round and had been highly praised for them. Land Rovers, by contrast, had drum brakes all round – which were adequate for a relatively slow vehicle, but not for one with the sort of road performance that King and Bashford envisaged for their new design. In an interview with the author some twenty-five years later, Gordon Bashford remembered that the original plans were drawn up around the biggest engine that Rover then had available, which was the 2995cc straight-six then in production for the Rover 3-litre saloon. It had been tried in detuned form in experimental Land Rovers, when it gave about 110bhp. Bashford also remembered that when he had completed the preliminary layouts, the wheelbase dimension worked out at 99.9in, and that he and King subsequently decided to round it up to 100in for convenience.

CHANGING DEMANDS

Meanwhile, Rover’s Managing Director, William (Bill) Martin-Hurst, was taking a very keen interest in improving the lacklustre sales of Rovers and Land Rovers in the USA. He had appointed a new team to run the Rover Company of North America (RCNA) from 1962, and he listened carefully to what they told him about the mismatches between US customer expectations and Rover’s existing products. As part of his attempt to get a better understanding of the US car market, he sent his market research manager, Graham Bannock, on a tour of the USA in summer 1965. When Bannock returned to his office at Rover’s Solihull works, he set about producing a comprehensive report on his findings.

The report was several months in the writing, and was finally distributed on 20 July 1966. Graham Bannock remembered in a 1993 interview that

…the real growth was coming from people who were buying Land Rovers to tow caravans, to go on holiday, by architects and surveyors who have to go across rough country… by people who were living in suburban houses but wanted to project the kind of image that most 4×4 buyers today want to project, of being real country types.

Land Rovers were not alone in catering for this emerging trend, of course, and further research showed that it was a trend that was emerging globally, and was not confined to the USA alone. Some US domestic manufacturers were already building vehicles that catered partially for it, such as the International Scout (introduced in 1961 and really a multi-purpose small farm truck) and the Jeep Wagoneer (introduced in 1963 and really a big passenger-carrying Jeep styled to look like an American station wagon or estate car).

That something new was happening had become clear when Ford had jumped on the bandwagon in 1965 with their new model, called the Bronco. This incorporated elements of the traditional workhorse 4×4 but was deliberately more comfortable, and was deliberately slanted towards outdoor leisure activity use – towing boats, carrying sports equipment, and getting to places where cars could not go, but without the truck-like qualities of traditional 4×4s.

Not surprisingly, one of the recipients of Bannock’s report was Spen King in the New Vehicle Projects department. At the time he was writing it, Bannock confirmed in 1993 that ‘I was not aware of the fact that Spen was already working on this vehicle.’ And yet, by an astonishing and fortuitous coincidence, the report recommended that Rover should look at developing ‘more or less what Spen and Gordon had already come up with – the vehicle concept.’

That coincidence caused a certain amount of excitement within New Vehicle Projects. It also helped to tip management opinion at Rover in favour of the new Land Rover that New Vehicle Projects were working on. Technical Director Peter Wilks had been supportive of the concept, but had also been undecided about its merits. He now became convinced that King and Bashford were on to something, and approved further work on it. So although they had no formal engineering budget, King and Bashford were now authorized to build a first prototype. All this was still going on within New Vehicle Projects; the mainstream Land Rover engineering teams were not involved because the project had purely research status at this stage.

A NEW ENGINE

In the meantime, there had been other changes at Rover that would feed into Spen King’s new idea. Bruce McWilliams, head of the Rover Company of North America, had made clear to Rover’s MD Bill Martin-Hurst that a major hindrance to Rover sales in the USA was a lack of power. This was a particular problem with Land Rovers: in an interview with the author in 2003, McWilliams explained that it was common for US Land Rover owners to tow their vehicles on an A-bar behind a car or pick-up to wherever they planned to go off-road driving, because the Land Rover was so slow on the road. So McWilliams suggested that he should see whether any American car makers would be prepared to sell V8 engines to RCNA to create a more powerful US-model Land Rover. Martin-Hurst told him to see what he could find.

During 1963, McWilliams located a Chrysler engine that might have been suitable, but before negotiations with Chrysler began, Martin-Hurst himself came across a better option. He was in the USA to negotiate a deal to sell Land Rover diesel engines for use in fishing boats, and at the workshops of Mercury Marine he saw a small aluminium-alloy V8 that the company intended to try out in a power boat. Learning that it was a General Motors design and had just been taken out of production that summer, he measured it up and realized that it was just the right size for Rover cars as well as Land Rovers. This engine would do far more than provide extra power for Land Rovers sold in the USA: it would meet all of Rover’s medium- and long-term needs for both cars and Land Rovers at a stroke.

The 215cu in V8 in its original Buick form; the one pictured was one of those that was delivered to Rover – it might even be the very engine that William Martin-Hurst had shipped over from Mercury Marine.

To cut a long story short, by January 1965 Martin-Hurst had arranged a deal under which Rover would take on a manufacturing and development licence for the Buick 215 V8 engine. Work on other new engines at Rover had stopped, and for the next eighteen months the company’s engine department would be working flat out to adapt the all-alloy Buick V8 for British manufacturing methods and British requirements. This was clearly to be the engine of the future at Solihull (it was first introduced in an up-engined Rover 3-litre called the 3.5-litre in autumn 1967), and Spen King and Gordon Bashford recognized that it would be perfect for their new Land Rover station wagon. So the 3.5-litre V8 rep...