STATESIDE

Down the USA’s west coast and then across Death Valley to the Grand Canyon

An epic roadtrip down the west coast of the USA, in a supercharged Land Rover Velar

AMERICANS ARE ROCK STARS AT MARKETING. Try to juice up a more sturdy name than Hellephant for a 1000 horsepower engine before charging at me with a counter. Then there’s Hellcat. Charger. Challenger. Demon. Cobra. Raptor. Raptor’s angry uncle, VelociRaptor. Gladiator. Even dreadful diesel engines are called Power Stroke. Not since Norton raced the Commando have such devastatingly cool names been slapped onto cars and trucks. And kids get cool names too.

No parent, I imagine, was in such a tearing hurry as to name his lad A$AP Rocky but you do have Ken Block — hardly The World’s Best Driver but definitely The World’s Greatest Car Entertainer! Only an American could have made those exhaustingly smoky Gymkhana videos, cooked up the Hoonigan brand, mutated a Mustang into the Hoonicorn and then slayed tyres of the Hoonitruck for Climbkhana. All to sell shoes. And more recently a slightly less disgustingly-flavoured energy drink.

Americans also have a thing for hyperbole. If Pikes Peak is the world’s most dangerous mountain, I don’t know what the Himalayas are. And America claims to have The World’s Best… well… everything. Pizza. Burger. Hot dog. President. Golf course. Road. Try living off burgers for a week or listening to Fox TV for just a day and you’ll draw very firm conclusions of your own, but at California’s Monterey Peninsula, the latter two are lent strong credence.

This is home to the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, the world’s most lavish vintage and classic car show and, completely unrelated to cars save for the clubs and bags being used as an occasional measure of boot space in Ferraris, the US Open golf tournament. I’ve never had a thing for golf until I drove past the Pebble Beach golf course. Perched on the cliffs are the greens and smashing into the cliffs are the waters of the Pacific — a scene that makes you go WTF at the sheer incredulousness of the sight before you. They, the Americans, say it is The World’s Most Photographed Golf Course and, for once, it doesn’t seem like oversell. Dammit, it’s maddeningly beautiful. Slap yourself, pinch yourself, wake-up-it’s-not-a-dream beautiful. And just to rub it in, when the golf balls aren’t zinging by, stags and deer graze on the greens.

You arrive at golfing Mecca after visiting The World’s Most Famous Corner — the corkscrew at Laguna Seca. Or I would have, except your correspondent woke up too late to the fact that nobody in the world works on the first Saturday of the new year and a cork was put into plans to let the V8 rip down the ’screw. What I instead experienced was something new, the joys of driving slowly. Everything in comfort, a distant rumble of the V8, and eyes wide open through the 17 Mile Drive, the selfstyled World’s Most Scenic Drive.

RANGE ROVER VELAR SV AUTOBIOGRAPHY

RANGE ROVER VELAR SV AUTOBIOGRAPHY Dynamic Edition has to be The World’s Longest Name for a car. It, in fact, takes much longer to say the name than get to 100kmph, thanks to The World’s Growliest Motor. And completely unrelated to any of this is the fact that this is The World’s Most Beautiful SUV, now with added nostrils to feed air to the ravenous motor and cool the ginormous brakes.

The Americans, of course, have their own concept of beauty, judging by the black Escalades their rappers stumble out of, in a medicinal haze. The Velar is hardly small, yet in American parking lots it gets dwarfed like a hatchback. But where it matters, the SVAD packs heat. I don’t think even the Americans will deem a 5-litre V8 to be insufficient but for good measure, bolted to the crank, is a supercharger. The end effect is power amped to a faintly ridiculous 542bhp. Torque is an elephantine 680Nm. And the gases liberate themselves in a hail of noise via four dustbin-sized squares sawn into the rear bumper. Hardly subtle, but wholly spectacular. The rims, lighter by a suitable impressive 2.5 kilos, are 22s. Twenty twos! The tyres are like toffee spread over the rims; there’s almost nothing by way of tyre profile. If anything it makes the Velar even more of a visual feast, to the end effect that my wife slapped me for taking more pictures of the car than her.

The other effect of no tyre profile is the race for what breaks first — the rim or your back. But, in keeping with that carbonfibre-lacquered badge on the nose, there is a genuine touch of luxury to this SUV. The seats are heavily quilted Windsor-something in such a sparkling white that I wet-wiped my pants every time I got into the car. The shift paddles are metal, the gear knob and other rotary controllers have knurled metal finishes and the doors have carbon inserts with woven metal wire adding subtle-bling (is there such a thing?). The air suspension delivers comfort, so much so that I trundle through 17 Mile Drive, stop every 100 metres or so to soak in the views, take another picture of the Velar, and make a mental note to figure out which credit card offers free golf lessons.