ROUGH ’N’ READY
The new Range Rover Sport SVR has speed, power and finesse to burn
NEW YORK— We were sitting in a big puddle of mud, water up past the axles. We wouldn’t make it out alive. Well, not without one helluva mess.
“OK, you can go,” said the instructor beside me. “Just take it easy on the gas. There’s 550 horsepower there, don’t forget.”
Don’t forget? How could I forget? We were sitting in bespoke sports seats, our thighs snugged by “Oxford leather” with an embossed “SVR” stamp nestled against our backs. The supercharged V8 burbled away under the optional $2,000 carbon fibre engine cover as the four wheels dug into the muck and pulled us clear with nary a spin.
“OK, let’s head over to the track,” said the instructor. After a quick rinse from a mobile power washer, we drove onto the nearby racetrack and edged the big SUV past 150 km/h, setting up for the first corner. If the back straight was longer, we could have hit 260.
Who lives like this? It makes no sense. Mud pits are for tall off-roaders and racetracks are for low-slung sports cars. Any vehicle that tries to be a jack-of-all-trades must surely be a master of none. But in the battle for buyers of performance SUVs, it’s all about bragging rights.
That’s why the new Range Rover Sport SVR can boast of lapping the Nurburgring in a remarkable eight minutes and 14 seconds. You’ll probably never drive there and you’re almost certainly not as good a race driver as the person behind that wheel, but your new Range Rover could probably do it if all the planets aligned. Land Rover drove more than 22,000 kilometres in testing at the famous German track to produce that time, setting a record last year for a production SUV. It was later thrashed with an astonishing sub-eight-minute lap by the new Porsche Cayenne Turbo S. I’ll bet the language was ripe in Britain that day.
More realistically, the big Range Rover can hurl its two-and-a-half tonnes of sculpted bulk from standstill to 100 km/h in a claimed 4.7 seconds. Again, the big Cayenne will wump that by more than half-a-second, but it sells for $50,000 above the SVR’s $124,990 sticker price.
In the showroom battle and the bench-racing war, it’s all about the size of your bank account — or your credit limit.
Is it worth it? You might think so, and if so, Range Rover wants you to consider the pinnacle of its engineering. The top-of-the-line Range Rover Sport is the first to wear the SVR badge of its Special Vehicle Operations performance division. The acronym surely stands for Special Vehicle Aaarrgh!
Spend the extra $32,500 above the price of a regular Range Rover supercharged V8 and you’ll get the same 5.0-litre engine that’s in the new Jaguar F-Type R coupe and convertible. It’s been tuned to make 40 hp more than the regular V8, as well as an extra 41 lbs.-ft. of torque, for a total of 550 hp and 502 lb.-ft.
Of course, it’s not just about brute strength but the management of all that power. Its maker calls the SVR the “most dynamically focused Land Rover ever (that) pushes breadth of capability even further.”
Its eight-speed automatic gearbox shifts twice as quickly as before and adapts to your driving style, while its suspension is upgraded all-around to improve cornering traction by 20 per cent.
Computerized actuators on each axle adjust 1,000 times a second to help keep everything flat around the curves.
The SVR’s all-aluminum unibody is 39-per-cent lighter than before, but don’t be fooled into thinking this is a lightweight. It’s not. If you want a reminder, just press the exhaust sound button on the centre console and listen to the enhanced crackle from the four pipes.
Up front, the SVR stands out from the regular Range Rover with larger air intakes, blue Brembo brake calipers over 15-inch discs, and its bespoke 21-inch wheels. If you really want to rub it in, the Estoril Blue metallic paint of the vehicle in the photo is exclusive to the SVR and costs an extra $1,800.
This is all very well, but how does it drive normally, away from the mudpits and the track?
Range Rover’s largest urban market is New York City, which is one reason I was invited here for the launch of its new flagship. The luxurious British SUV is popular here because of its prestige, its capability in bad weather and its safety record — it’s strong as a tank against the crazy city traffic that drives with special rubber bumper covers for defence.
All that off-road testing comes in handy for slippery roads on the way to the mall and the Range Rover SVR compromises nothing.
It provides full-time four-wheel drive and a two-speed transfer case that can push up to 100 per cent of the power to either the front or the back axles.
Its torque-vectoring management uses the brakes to adjust the power to each wheel when cornering, and traction is monitored 100 times a second by the vehicle’s computer.
Yeah, yeah. Most owners don’t care about that stuff. They buy the Range Rover because of its prestige and its insulating comfort. It’s a place to forget the horrors of the crush outside.
The SVR is as quiet inside as its less-powerful sibling, provided you don’t opt for the $4,550 Meridian Signature Reference Audio and crank its 1,700 watts. The interior is sporty with carbon-fibre inserts and those bespoke racing-style seats front and back, but it’s comfortable, too. Such seats often compromise cushioning so that frequent breaks are welcome, but not these.
There are six different settings for terrain, in case you’re driving in sand, or over mud and ruts, and they include a setting for sporty driving that quickens and tightens everything. Or you can just set it to Auto and let the computer figure everything out.
So again: is it all worth it? Probably not. There’s surely better value to be found if you’re looking for comfort, performance or capability.
But if you really want to do it all — or at least, be able to know you can do it all, although you might not feel like doing so right now — a performance SUV is the way to go.
The Range Rover SVR is truly a flagship for the company and an example of what can be achieved by today’s talented engineers and designers. It’s ridiculous excess, but it’s your money. Freelance writer Mark Richardson is a frequent contributor to Toronto Star Wheels. For this story, his travel expenses were paid by the manufacturer. To reach Wheels Editor Norris McDonald: nmcdonald@thestar.ca