Mucking around
The Nomad lives for the world’s great o -road wildernesses. An hour on Lincolnshire farm tracks is the best we can do – for now. By Ben Miller
In reality, unless you live in one of the UK’s wilder corners, you need a farmer. Lincolnshire might be free of teeming cities but it’s heaving with farmers who love cash, guns, shirts patterned like graph paper and – inexplicably – pick-up trucks almost as much as they hate trespassers. Which makes off-roading fairly dicult.
Fortunately, having bought the right people pints over the years, I know one or two farmers. And so the Nomad and I finally turned off tarmac this month, for a bit of a play/important test-car analysis. The tracks on which the Ariel and I found ourselves were dry, flat and largely boulder-free. I’ve negotiated more challenging car parks. But still, they were ours. For a bit.
Just as, on paper at least, the Nomad looks completely ‘wrong’ as a fast road car, so it doesn’t look particularly ‘right’ as an off-roader, either. There’s no low-range transmission, no hill-descent control, no locking diffs and no four-wheel drive. More encouraging are the knobbly tyres, the Baja-spec Fox dampers and the winch.
Turning off the road and onto a farm track potholed like the moon, the first thing that strikes you is that little changes. The Ariel barely notices the transition, its decadently damped, long-travel suspension rendering even huge wheel deflections almost entirely benign. So you go faster, and if anything the Nomad feels better. This ‘issue’ – that the Ariel’s so together that it actually feels better the harder you go – is equally applicable on tarmac and dirt.
Inevitably, you quickly get carried away. As on the road, the Nomad likes a trailing throttle or some light braking as you turn, to help the front bite. What the rear does is entirely up to you, the sublimely physical, interactive steering making catching slides as easy as breathing. A comet’s tail of dust fills your mirrors. The Honda engine, bolted to your back, pours revs, torque and oversteer into the Yokos as it fills your world with noise. In your peripheral vision wheels bounce, dampers damp and the rest of the world tries to ignore this mechanical menace charging about an otherwise unspoiled rural idyll, having what looks suspiciously like an obscene amount of fun. Must. Buy. A Nomad. And a sprawling farm.
The decadently damped suspension renders even huge wheel deflections entirely benign