Round the Clock
Meet the Discovery 2 that’s still going strong despite clocking up more than 1,000,000 kilometres
The story of how one Discovery Down Under is still going strong after clocking up one million kilometres
Harry Sirros has racked up more than a million kilometres in his 2004 Discovery Td5 – and it’s still going strong. And he reckons this remarkable milestone has been reached mainly thanks to regular servicing at an independent Land Rover specialist garage in Sydney, Australia.
Harry, a former airline pilot, resides in Bowral, in New South Wales. “The Discovery does some stop-start city driving and I used to do a bit of towing, but mainly it’s been up and down between Bowral and Sydney, nearly every day,” says Harry.
The Discovery Td5 has also seen its fair share of offroad driving and touring. “I’ve driven it around Australia three of four times, too... up to Darwin, around the Kimberley, down through Alice Springs,” continues Harry.
“When I was a pilot with Qantas I used to fly around over the bush, so when I got the Discovery I went back to explore all the old places I had flown over.
“My Disco is like a comfy slipper or a well-worn boot. The interior has been eaten in, slept in, changed clothes in... and it’s never been garaged.”
Through most of its remarkable life, Harry’s Discovery has been cared for by Roving Mechanical of Sydney. “I’ve serviced Harry’s Discovery from almost new,” says Roving Mechanical’s Peter Davis. “It’s had two transmissions but I haven’t had to do any internal work to the engine; it still has the original head and block.”
Peter also reveals that Harry can be surprisingly lax with servicing. “I’ve known him to go 40,000 km and not service it and then he might have us perform the next three 10,000 km services in a row. In the circumstances, it’s surprising how well that engine has held up,” he says.
It also helps, of course, that Australia enjoys a dry climate where salt isn’t used on the roads. That means rust isn’t an issue and Aussie Discovery 2s don’t suffer the sort of terminal chassis corrosion that has led to so many of their European counterparts making a premature trip to the scrapyard.
Peter Davis started Roving Mechanical 18 years ago as a mobile Land Rover servicing business. In 2016 he teamed up with Glen Wickens and opened a workshop in the Sydney suburb of Peakhurst.
“I’ve worked on Land Rovers, since 1980,” says Peter. “Glen has done all of his training on late-model Land Rovers, and he’s a Level 4 Technician, so he knows a lot about them.”
The most recent addition to the Roving Mechanical team is Mark Elvins. Between Peter, Glen and Mark there’s 72 years of Land Rover spannering.
“From Defenders to the latest vehicles, we have all the computers, equipment and specialised tools to work on any Land Rover,” boasts Peter.
After a racking up a million kilometres, Harry Sirros is a contented Roving Mechnical customer. “If I’d had the Discovery serviced at a dealership I would have turfed it years ago,” he says. “Peter know these vehicles back to front. You can get parts without having to pay thousands of dollars through a franchise dealer and with a specialist like Roving Mechanical, you’ve got someone to talk to – you can’t always do that at a franchise dealership.”
And what happens when a Discovery’s odometer reaches the million-kilometre mark? It stops, of course, at 999, 999km. Harry now relies on the trip-meter to keep track of the Discovery’s servicing requirements.