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Charles and Diana’s favourite Land Rover makes over £ 100,000 at auction
Charles and Diana’s favourite Land Rover makes over £100,000 at auction
RANGE Rover that was a personal favourite of Prince Charles and Princess Diana has been sold at auction for over £100,000. The 42-year-old three-door, which had been abandoned in a Worcestershire farmyard for 15 years, was treated to full restoration before fetching £101,250 at the Silverstone Classic Car Auction. It had been expected to make £80,000.
The 3.5-litre V8 petrol model in Lincoln Green was delivered to the Royal
ATwenty Ten spent 1000 hours restoring it
Household on August 13, 1976, but was a 1975 model-year vehicle. Archive photographs show Charles, Diana and Prince Philip driving it over the years. It was particularly popular due to its factory-fitted full-length Webasto sunroof, which allowed the Royals to stand up and wave to crowds.
“Whether driven by Prince Charles during his courtship with the late Diana, Prince Philip nonchalantly standing on the rear tailgate, or picking their Royal Highnesses Prince and Princess Michael of Kent up from Heathrow, period photographs of this vehicle are abound in online archives,” said a spokesman for Silverstone Auctions.
The most famous image of all was when Princess Diana was photographed in 1982 sitting on the hood of the Range Rover at the Grand National racecourse while she was pregnant with Prince William.
But after its years with the most famous family in the world, it fell upon hard times and eventually ended up in a sorry state, riddled with rust and with its seized engine in the boot. Twenty Ten Engineering of Redditch spent over 1000 hours restoring it to factory-fresh condition. At that point it had 62,000 miles on the odometer.
Philip Holland of Twenty Ten said the most difficult part of the restoration was finding the large number of rare parts required.
This isn’t the record price for a Range Rover. In 2014 the very first one off the line in 1970, with chassis number 001, sold for £132,250. Nor is it the record price for an ex-royal family Range Rover. In July 2016 the Range Rover SE Vogue
Ex-royal Range Rovers fetch top money
that had been driven by Prince William to pick up Princess Kate and newborn baby Prince George from St Mary’s Hospital, London, three years earlier, was sold for £150,000 via an advert in Auto Trader.
Ex-royal Land Rovers always fetch a premium. Back in 2011 another Range Rover – this time a 1979 model that had been used by Charles and Diana as their honeymoon car at Balmoral in 1981 – was sold by classic car dealers Graeme Hunt Ltd for £82,750.
Land Rovers have always been popular with the Royal family – an association that dates back to the launch of the original Series I in 1948. In fact, they were so pleased that in 1951 King George VI granted Land Rover the Royal Warrant.
When the Range Rover was launched in 1970, the Royal Family were first in the queue and have owned every model since launch to the current, either in standard production form or with bespoke features. Photographs and newsreels through to the present day show the Queen and her family at the wheel or alighting from a Range Rover more than any other model of car.