‘IT’S UP THERE WITH CONCORDE’
Range Rover Reborn chief engineer Mike Bishop reveals the early Range Rover’s technical secrets, and a groundbreaker whose legacy goes way beyond just SUVS
We have some great rivals today, but back in 1970 there was nothing like the Range Rover,’ Mike Bishop remarks as he takes in the Davos White 1974 example his team has just restored. ‘Certainly nothing like it in Europe, and although in the US you had the Ford Bronco and the Jeep Wagoneer, the Bronco was just a pickup truck really, and the Wagoneer wasn’t even available with four-wheel drive at the time. The Range Rover, like the original Mini, was an all-new idea.’
As the engineer in charge of Land Rover’s Range Rover Reborn restoration programme, few people know this car quite so intimately, but Bishop’s affinity with the car has been lifelong. ‘I have fond memories of being thrown around in the back of a Lincoln Green Range Rover, driven round wine wholesalers back in Australia when I was a kid,’ he recalls. ‘Me and my siblings, Tetrised in at the back, listening to that V8.’
So what’s the Range Rover’s big secret? ‘Like modern SUVS, its chassis design was more like a car than a traditional off-roader,’ Mike explains. ‘The chassis is similar to a Rover P6’s in its panelson-frame construction, and in fact police-specification P6s used Range Rover-derived long-travel suspension, with the rocker lever against the bulkhead. That’s the key to both the Range Rover’s car-like ride quality and its off-road ability – before it was released, people just accepted that off-roaders would have a rough-andready character as a trade-off for their abilities. Not any more.
‘As per any engineer, Spen King had to work with what he’d got, which meant a Land-rover rear axle, and a Buick V8 from the Rover parts bin. However, at the time Land-rover was working on a new gearbox for heavy-duty jobs, which featured constant four-wheel drive, and split drive loads evenly between axles.
‘King started out by installing the V8 into a standard Landrover Series II, which spent its development time wheelspinning and drifting its way around the Lode Lane factory site. But the problem was the existing gearbox. As soon as the new constantdrive gearbox went into the test mule, it solved the problem, so King decided his new car - then known internally as the V8 Station Wagon, would have to have all-time four-wheel drive. ‘I had the pleasure of meeting King, and creatively he was on another plane. While he was limited by what was available to him through Rover, he had the kind of clean-sheet visionary ability that Maurice Wilks and Sir Alec Issigonis had. And given Land-rover’s success after World War Two, it had plenty of money for King to play with, and so allowed him a large amount of autonomy. As a result, the Range Rover was a car designed fundamentally by engineers. David Bache may have styled it, but in reality his job was to tidy up the details. That’s the reason why it’s such a clean design. Rather than today, where car designs tend to be very complex as a result of lots of different specialists approaching it from their own perspective resulting in separate parts all individually styled, the Range Rover was completely engineering-led. Spen styled it really.
‘A lot of the ideas started elsewhere in Rover. For example, it made a small coil-sprung aluminium-framed monocoque prototype in the late Forties. I pointed out its similarity to the Range Rover to King and he said, “Not quite, but we would transfer ideas from one
‘The Range Rover was completely engineering-led’
car to another.” The Range Rover’s use of a steel body frame set it apart from what Land Rover had done before. The Tickford-built Land Rover Station Wagon wasn’t strong – it had a wooden-framed body that fell apart in hard off-road use.
‘Rover’s gas-turbine prototype was four-wheel drive, and engineers like Geof Miller fed off this. People would come up with ideas and play with them back then. The gas-turbine engine didn’t work, but the idea of a four-wheel-drive car did. Wilks always maintained that there was no such thing as a crazy idea.
‘So, by the time the Range Rover was created, four-wheel drive was nothing new, but packaging it into something useful was an issue because this was to be a car for all seasons – working vehicle, family car, grand tourer and so on. And this introduced new ideas into the market. The use of plastics and synthetic fibres in luxury-car interiors, for example. As a working car, it needed an interior that could get muddy and be hosed down. So an adventurously moulded plastic dashboard was used, but shaped in such a way that it completely enclosed the wiring underneath so it didn’t look messy, and had power sockets in the steering column. That attention to detail meant that plastics could be accepted by the luxury market, and their practicality compared to the wood and leather of luxury saloons changed the perception of what the buyers wanted.’ Land Rover managed to successfully second-guess the entire market, as Mike explains.
‘I have an internal marketing report from 1968, forecasting the rise of what we now call SUVS, and Rover got it completely right with the exception of the Russian and Chinese markets – they opened up in the Nineties rather than the Seventies. The biggest export market was the US, so Land Rover tested everything the Range Rover would be up against out there, especially the Toyota Land Cruiser. However, because of emissions legislation, the Range Rover wasn’t available in the US until 1987. But it was always a global idea, which made Australia – its biggest early export market – its most important. Australia’s ADR safety rules are some of the world’s toughest, given the state of the roads, so in the first few years they dictated the Range Rover’s evolution. This is an Australian car, and you’ll notice the mirrors are on the doors rather than the bonnet. This is because of an ADR rule stating they had to be adjustable from the driver’s seat without moving it. Inertia-reel seatbelts are integrated into the seats themselves, and although the doors have internal handles front and rear so any passenger can open them, the rear set close against the sides of the front seats, so they can only be opened once the seats are tilted forward.’
These were all signs of Land Rover thinking beyond its usual customer base, as Mike explains, ‘When it was first engineered, it
‘It quickly became evident that it wasn’t just blokes who led practical lives’
was from a blokey point of view, seen as a man’s car, but as sales began it quickly became evident that it wasn’t just blokes who led practical lives. The seats were reshaped, and the power steering and the rear wiper were added in response to feedback from female buyers. This led to a practicality-first approach when designing things like the fuel filler cap, folding rear seat and tailgate. Use of gas struts, weighting and spring loading meant they only needed one touch to operate them. The sheer practicality of King’s design approach meant it could appeal to many more people. It wasn’t just the first SUV, it was one of the first hatchbacks, and nowadays people don’t immediately recognise the significance of this. And that split tailgate also meant the car had its own workbench. You didn’t need to take a picnic table if you went out. You can stand on it and paint the side of your house.’ However, economic conditions threatened to scupper Land Rover’s creativity, handing the initiative in an unlikely direction, as Mike explains. ‘A four-door prototype was built in 1974, but British Leyland had no money. So Swiss manufacturer Monteverdi built one with Land Rover’s cooperation instead. This enthusiasm for expensive customised Range Rovers in the Seventies inspired people to see its potential and invest in it, and eventually by the time the car was ready for US export, Land Rover could afford to build its own. These luxury-special Range Rovers also encouraged Land Rover to offer leather trim, and by that point they’d started glueing the body to the frame to eliminate squeaks and rattles. But before then you could unbolt the body panels to replace them just like you can on a P6.’
Interestingly, despite having a V8 as the sole engine option for the first 18 years of its life, the Range Rover was designed from the off to support a whole series of powerplants, a fact that has only recently been discovered. Mike explains, ‘About 10 years ago, I was in the engineering archive looking for something for a club magazine story, and found a Range Rover pre-production engine arrangement drawing from 1969 featuring a 2.5-litre diesel.
‘This engine wouldn’t have moved a Range Rover, but at the time Rover was looking at the situation in the Middle East. Even at this point in the Sixties the oil price was going up, and as a result the engine bay was shaped to fit a variety of different engines. So by the time there was a demand for it in the Eighties, the VM turbodiesel slotted right in without any need for structural modification.
‘As it was, the 3.5-litre V8 was deemed to have more than enough power and torque for all uses, and this decision ended up frozen in time, pre-oil crisis, because of the way BL worked. No smaller,
more economical engine was powerful enough to work with the transmission and the weight of the car. At the time, BL had the option of using a 4.4-litre V8 from the Australian-market Leyland P76. It was tested in a Range Rover, and while it was torquier in the midrange, there was no increase in overall performance. There wouldn’t be a bore increase until the P38 of the Nineties.’
Next, Mike introduces us to the cutaway chassis, originally prepared for 1970 motor shows and now recently restored after many years in storage. ‘One problem the engineers had to solve early on was the way the rear end of the prototypes dragged under load,’ he notes. ‘While they were trying to address this issue, they attended the Paris Motor Show, saw a Mercedes 600 Pullman cutaway chassis with scissor-action self-levelling rear suspension, and decided the Range Rover had to have it too.
‘It’s called the Boge Hydromat, and it’s a gas-filled cylinder that, unlike a damper, expands rather than contracts under load, using the motion of the suspension to pump itself up to a pre-set height. Later Range Rovers had dual-rate coil springs instead, but when the Reborn project started restoring early Range Rovers, we had to work out how to properly rebuild this thing. I found out via Google Translate that ZF now owns the patent for the Hydromat, grabbed their heritage engineering guys off their stand at Techno Classica Essen and said, “Come with me, I need to show you something!” They were amazed – they had no idea the exact-same system as found in Mercedes was used in Range Rovers. The dual-rate coils are much simpler than the Hydromat – different frequencies are created within the same spring using different tightnesses of wrapping. The looser sections absorb surface undulations while the tighter section stays firm.
‘The heart of the Range Rover is, of course, its constant four-wheel drive system – very sophisticated kit,’ says Mike as he explains the bare chassis’ vast exposed gearbox. ‘As with things like the fuel filler flap and the tailgate, it’s designed with driver-focused straightforwardness in mind. The diff lock is vacuum-operated by a switch, and works incredibly quickly to operate a selector fork and locking dog to lock the centre diff with the single press of a button.
‘It’s a very visual system. In the Land Rover the levers are colour coded on a traffic-light system. The gearknob is green because you use it in normal driving, the diff lock lever is amber as you use it when exercising caution, and the low-ratio gearbox is operated with a red lever, because you have to stop before engaging it, all reflecting the road conditions. The Range Rover nods to this tradition with an amber-illuminated ‘DIFF LOCK’ light. But the whole point was that it was intuitive and simple – if things get serious, hit this button.
‘It’s things like this that make me feel that the Range Rover should be considered in the same way as Concorde, another practicality-driven, simple design that never aged. This car invented the SUV, changed the way family hatchbacks are designed, and it has genuinely stood the test of time. The Jaguar E-type was flawed, old-fashioned in its own lifetime and built for 13 years. We’re still building Range Rovers, this original shape was in production for 25 years, and the latest models still follow the same brief. So which deserves to be considered the greater design icon?’
‘It used the same rear suspension design as a Mercedes 600 Pullman’