Gary Pusey “Sadly, the V888 has been consigned to history by the demon known as the General Data Protection Regulation”

The Enthusiast

AMONTH or two ago I wrote about the Stage One V8 88-inch Station Wagon that’s the latest addition to my collection of far too many old Land Rovers. While I wait for a gap in DLR’S busy workshop schedule that will give us enough time to dismantle it and start repairing the chassis, I’ve been amusing myself by researching these largely forgotten vehicles which seem to be a bit of a footnote in Land Rover history.

But first things first, and I started by looking through the old registration documents that came with the vehicle, because we all want to know who owned our Land Rovers before us, don’t we? Three previous owners’ names were revealed, out of eight before me, although I’m sure the 88 would have been first registered to Land Rover, so that means only four are missing.

Until recently, the best thing provided by the DVLA was the V888 vehicle enquiry service. I was a regular user of this and I could never understand why so few owners seemed to make use of it. Once you’d demonstrated a genuine need for the information, the DVLA would send you copies of everything they had on your vehicle, which sometimes would stretch back to before the records were computerised in the mid-1970s and include copies of the original old logbooks. For keen owners and historians it was an absolutely invaluable source of information.

Sadly, the V888 has been consigned to history by the demon known as the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR to you and me. This worthy piece of legislative bureaucracy, designed to protect our privacy and ensure that unscrupulous businesses cannot misuse or illicitly profit from our personal details, has had an unforeseen side effect by convincing the DVLA that it can no longer provide you with the names and addresses of previous owners of your vehicle without their consent, which in effect means all that priceless history will now be locked away in the DVLA’S computer systems forever. A great shame.

The next thing was to reach for the reference books and the back issues of the monthly Land Rover magazines, to see what I could unearth. The reality, in the case of the Stage One 88s, is not a lot! And what does exist in print struck me as full of more than a dash of speculation, conjecture and guesswork. One notable exception was the pair of articles written by one well-respected writer who did an excellent job in researching the history of the first vehicle built, an Inca Yellow soft-top that still exists in northeast England and which was constructed at Land Rover’s Drayton Road facility in early 1981. Another article written nearly 20 years ago mentioned a previous owner of our 88. If you’re out there,

Chris Moore, I’d love to hear from you!

But pretty much everything else I found seemed to me to be inadequately researched, including a story that claimed the Stage One 88s never went into production because they were underbraked, which I think is nonsense! Some writers weren’t even sure how many Stage One 88s were built. This is reasonably easy to answer by booking a day at the British Motor Museum’s reading room at Gaydon. Seven days’ notice is required but when we arrived all the files we’d asked for were ready for inspection, either via digital images or in wonderful well-thumbed old ledgers with a vaguely Dickensian feel to them. It wasn’t my first visit, and I’m sure it won’t be my last!

Within an hour we’d satisfied ourselves that following that first Inca Yellow prototype, four more Stage One 88s were built at Solihull, presumably as evaluation vehicles or pre-production engineering assessment vehicles. And there was ours, the third of the four by VIN number, the second of the four to be built, and the first to be registered for the road. As expected, the first owner was the company itself, and the vehicle was initially allocated to the Senior Workshop Manager at Drayton Road before passing to the Product Planning department at Solihull. Was this where it was being looked at with a view to entering production? What did it do during its time with the company, and what happened to it? Have any photographs of it survived from those years, before it was eventually disposed of through the dealer network?

The only way to pursue the investigation further will be to try to speak with Land Rover people who were there at the time, to see if anyone has personal recollections or, hopefully, some casually-snapped photographs lying buried in the family album.

While we were at the BMM we also wanted to investigate the batch of ‘production’ Stage One 88s built in 1982. Some of the articles I’d read suggested there were 25 of these, while another writer thought there were 26. We found a distinct batch of 24, with a possible two more a year later, all of which were delivered to the Rover agent in Trinidad. One of the enduring mysteries surrounding these vehicles is why they were built in the first place. The generally-accepted theory is they were ordered by the Jamaican Police but, following the cancellation of the order, they ended up in Trinidad. Some are still known to exist there. But I’m not totally convinced by this story. What’s needed is proof. I’ll let you know how I get on.

Gary Pusey is co-author of Range Rover The First Fifty, trustee of The Dunsfold Collection and a lifelong Land Rover enthusiast. What this man doesn’t know, isn’t worth knowing!