A tale of two Range Rovers
1978 RANGE ROVERS
THERE WAS SOMETHING amiss with my Range Rovers, but I couldn’t understand what until I did some homework. With both the cars finally in Italy, I had the opportunity to look at them in a more relaxed and direct way. And the more I did so, the more I began to realise that the information I had about them – which indicated that one was built in 1979, the other in 1980 – was not correct.
The one I was given (the ‘Italian’ car), described as a 1980 model, had an English V5 registration document linked to its Q-prefix numberplate, which was issued in 1997, when the car was re-imported into the UK. It states that the year of manufacture is unknown, but the ‘suffix F’ chassis number is correctly recorded. The other was bought in the Netherlands as a ‘suffix F’ car in 1979, yet I couldn’t spot any of the supposed differences between the model years.
That’s when I sought help from the British Motor Museum at Gaydon. For £42 they sent me two Heritage Certificates: one for each car. And I was amazed by what they revealed. Not only were both cars built in 1978, they were only three months apart, one having left the factory on 11 February, the other on 13 May. The first was dispatched to British Leyland Italy on 20 February (my birthday), while the Dutch example was a left-hand-drive home market car, originally sent to UAC Motors of London, though not until October, five months after it was built.
In the meantime, I got lucky. When I went to see the ‘Italian’ car, I spotted something under a seat: a green plastic envelope, from an insurance office in Genoa, full of paper, MoTs and insurance renewals from its days in England, from 1997 to 2013. In one of these documents was the Italian numberplate too. Using that as my starting point, I’m now looking in the Italian DMV to try to track the early history of the car.
Unfortunately I can’t find what exactly defines ‘LHD Home Market’ specification, and the internet doesn’t provide any clues about UAC Motors. Can any Octane readers help?