Range Rovers by Panther
In the Eighties Dave Strange worked on Panther Cars’ specialist Range Rover team. Here he reveals tales of poisonous spiders and hiding from Rolls-royce
‘Icame into the conversion business while working for Emilio Garcia at Autokraft, doing race preparation on AC Cobras, then cutting roofs off Ferrari Daytonas to turn them into Spiders,’ recalls Dave Strange. He’s a master trimmer nowadays, working on some of the world’s most exacting restorations including the ex-ian Fleming and Donald Campbell AC Acecas, but back in the Eighties, when money talked and provenance was less important, he learnt his craft on outrageous custom cars, built for some of the planet’s wealthiest people. ‘Emilio was a nightmare to work for, so I went to work for Panther instead. It was based in an old aircraft hangar. One big room, containing the office, parts department, the metalwork shop at one end, paint shop at the other, and the Kallista sports car production line running on a ramp down the middle, typically with five or six cars on it.’ The company was owned by a Korean at the time, Young Chull Kim, and the body and chassis units arrived from South Korea to be bolted together into complete cars.
‘But either side of this line were two special conversion lines, one for Mercedes, the other for Range Rovers – I was on the Range Rover team. We’d build them in batches of five, usually for the same dealership at any one time, all to the same specification but in different colour schemes, before they were sent off, 90 percent of them to Saudi Arabia. At the time, oil had only recently been discovered there, and within living memory the main type of transport had been the camel. Suddenly, a lot of people were absolutely rolling in money, more than they knew what to do with. And they wanted special Range Rovers.
‘We offered them with both four- and six-wheel drive. Most were six-wheelers, with an extra transmission box bolted on at the back. In the build process, we’d get a specification sheet – just a piece of handwritten paper from the sales team – with everything the client needed doing, but no instructions as to how to do it. It was just up to us engineers to figure it out, and the bloke who ran Panther at the time was an ex-washing machine company MD who didn’t know anything about cars! But it was actually wonderful because this meant there was no interference from management. We had a team leader and a second in command – both engineers – and that was it. The cars were cost-no-object, the only important thing was that they got built!
‘For example, one of them was a beige six-wheeler built for an Arab prince. It had a 42-inch stretch between its front and middle axles, and a 36-inch stretch behind the rear axle. It had a huge air-conditioning unit, right above a red throne – which looked like the chair from Jim’ll Fix It – with big pods either side to operate absolutely everything in the vehicle. Standard equipment on a Panther Range Rover at the time included a colour television, video recorder, Clarion stack hi-fi, drinks cabinet and decanter, and a fridge in the boot from which chilled gin and whisky could be pumped through to a push-buttonoperated dispenser inside. Alcohol is illegal in Saudi Arabia, but they all still had it.
‘We also trimmed them in leather and walnut, fitted Mercedes electric seats and offered automatic gearboxes – not things you could get on a standard Range Rover at the time, but things Land Rover picked up on later on. Sapphire Engineering in Byfleet worked with us too, supercharging the engines – ventilated by a very crude-looking box on the bonnet – and producing the axles for the widened cars we did. We did three in total – in green, burgundy and blue – they were a foot wider. And it wasn’t just a wide-body conversion, they had increased space in the rear and the bodywork was done in our metalwork shop. They retained the standard-width tailgate, with the extra width disguised by an extra pair of taillights.
‘We did build a demonstrator – a blue six-wheeler – which appeared in publicity photos, although this was very low-budget, especially given the money being spent on the cars. The “model” sitting inside demonstrating the various features of the car was just a girl who worked in the office. The six-wheel-drive system wasn’t just for show, but a system properly designed for driving in the desert, and the cars got upgraded Koni coil-over-damper units and heavy-duty all-terrain radial tyres. A rollcage was standard equipment too, in case they rolled it climbing a sand dune. Amazingly, they were just like any other Range Rover to drive.
‘The demo car had been abandoned in the desert by its owner, who sent it back to us for rebuilding with just 6000 miles on the clock. The doors had been left open, and it was absolutely full of sand, its paintwork sandblasted off. When it was returned to us for rebuilding, while we were clearing the sand out during the stripdown a colleague of mine was bitten by a spider, and his arm completely swelled up. Suddenly, he was off to a tropical diseases
‘The demo car had been abandoned in the desert by its owner with just 6000 miles on the clock’
‘We made a Range Roverbased notchback saloon with Cadillac headlights and a Rolls-royce grille’
unit, being pumped full of antibiotics, and an NHS team arrived at Panther and supervised us while we looked for the offending spider. We found 160 spiders in the factory that day, but the offending one was never caught! After that, a container was put outside the factory, so any cars returning from the Middle East could be fumigated before work was carried out.
‘I designed and built an elevating seat that went straight up through a Webasto sunroof on hydraulic rams, with a footrest that opened up as the chair extended. It sat alongside a falcon perch – falconry is a major activity in Saudi Arabia, and it seemed that this owner was too lazy to get out of his car to fly his falcon!
‘We did a couple of convertibles, based on two-door cars, but they were relatively easy because the Range Rover chassis is so strong. The roof panels just unbolted, so it wasn’t difficult. The only structural modification needed was boxed-in sills.’ However, the most extreme conversion is also one Dave is most proud of, the car he refers to as ‘the Coupé’. It was a four-door notchback saloon based on a Range Rover, but featuring Cadillac headlights and a Rolls-royce identity brought about by using a radiator grille and boot handle from a Silver Shadow. ‘We had to cover up the grille during the build because Rolls-royce would’ve gone mad if they’d found out, but the bloke who commissioned it – we never knew precisely who we were building these cars for because they would all go via the Saudi dealerships – absolutely insisted on it. ‘It had a 400ci (6.5-litre) Chevrolet V8, which was lovely to build. These were the days before crate engines, so it arrived in thousands of boxes from America and I got to put it together, a hugely satisfying task. It was lovely to drive too – rorty, lovely V8 burble, lots of low-down torque and you could feel it twisting under acceleration. It was a lovely tourer. The white leather seats with red mink inserts weren’t to my taste though!
‘In the end, Panther ran into trouble when the supply of MG Midget doors for the Kallista ran out, and they suspended production to create the Solo, a sports car with a mid-mounted Ford Escort XR3I engine and a chassis full of rust traps, that was doomed as soon as the Toyota MR2 came out. I was at Panther for two or three years before deciding to retrain as a trimmer – what I’ve always wanted to do, and what I’ve been doing ever since.’