GARY PUSEY
The Enthusiast
“I suspect BMW couldn’t wait to get rid of it and replace it with something in their own image”
Why has it been so unloved for so long, even to the extent that its parents did their best to pretend it had never been born? I am talking about the P38A, of course, the Range Rover that Land Rover (or was it BMW?) couldn’t wait to get rid of. And when they replaced it, they all but ignored its very existence for years.
I remember getting a call from Nick Dimbleby in 2010, after he had been commissioned by JLR to photograph the then-current third-generation Range Rover together with YVB, the Tuscan Blue Velar that had starred in the promotional films back in 1970. The occasion was, of course, the 40th anniversary. Nick had spent many hours trying to find the locations in North Wales that were used for those early shots of the YVB climbing a rocky track to a remote and idyllic farmhouse, carrying an equally idyllic family. Astonishingly, Nick’s detective work had paid off and he not only found the locations but also secured permission to re-visit them with the YVB and its 2010 descendant.
Nick thought it would be good to include the missing generation – the P38A – in the shoot. And because he wanted a blue car to match the other two, and because I happened to have a blue P38A, I was invited along. To a Range Rover nut this was, of course, not far short of a pilgrimage: to be driving the same hill roads alongside the same Velar that had driven them all those years ago.
It was a fun few days and the resultant video can be found readily on the internet. It is really very good indeed. Have a look. It lasts just over four minutes. Watch it very, very carefully and you will catch a nanosecond of P38A as the three vehicles disappear into the sunset. The first time I watched the video I blinked at the wrong moment, and missed my moment of glory.
But I have to confess that I understood why Nick’s client had decided that the footage of my car would end up on the cutting room floor. I was not a fan of the P38A myself when I first saw it in 1994, at the launch event at my local dealership in Somerset. It was easy to criticise it. Too much technology, styling that wasn’t as pure as the original, a bit bloated, a touch of London black cab about it.
The reality is that the team that had the job of creating the new Range Rover had been handed a bit of a hospital pass. How could you design a replacement for something that was already a bestselling legend? Take some of the styling cues and carry them forward? Of course. Improve on some of the things the original was actually not too good at, like rear seat legroom? Yes. Ensure the off-road capability was maintained, or hopefully improved upon? Check. Update the vehicle dynamics to make them match the aspirations to luxury of the original? Yes. Adopt modern technology, and push the boundaries to ensure that the new vehicle was a ground-breaking, market-leading 4x4? Absolutely.
And the team did all of these things, and did them well, but even then Land Rover was sufficiently concerned that it overlapped production of the Range Rover Classic, presumably just in case the new car bombed. The launch was allegedly the most expensive in the company’s history. I still have the mailshots that arrived through my letter box at the time, one a week. The first containing an autumn leaf that appeared to have been posted from Vermont, the second a seashell from Patagonia, the third a chrysanthemum from Japan, and the fourth an invitation to a launch event.
But the car didn’t bomb. It was universally acclaimed, and the new kid on the block sold well... until those darned technology gremlins started to wreak havoc, and the car’s reputation took a dive. BMW, the company’s new owners from 1994, was never a fan and explored various avenues to try to turn the car into what they thought it should be. There were even plans to install a BMW V12 engine, and at least one car was built. But at the end of the day, I suspect BMW couldn’t wait to get rid of it and replace it with something in their own image.
All of which is a shame. An accident of timing and history, perhaps? But as time marches on, such injustices have a tendency to be corrected, and the P38A has quite rightly been coming into its own for a while now. I think the general shift started a few years ago, when magazines started to feature the P38A, and enthusiasts like Julian Lamb suggested that early P38A vehicles were worthy of saving, in the same way that Geof Miller and others had in the 1980s started a club whose initial objective was to find and save the original Velars.
Sadly, I had to sell that blue P38A when it finally succumbed to something very expensive in the transmission department. But I loved it. And I have replaced it, with several P38s in fact. Just in case the gremlins strike again.