Land Rover Legends
Colin Parkes entered his first Land Rover trial in 1957 at the age of 16 and went on to work for the company as a driver for over 30 years. This is his story…
Colin Parker was a driver for Land Rover for over 30 years... We hear some of his confessions
WE rolled six or seven times”, remembers Colin Parkes. “Dan Archer was driving the Range Rover and I was in the passenger seat with a recording and measuring rig on my lap, and we’d just come onto the banking at MIRA when the offside rear tyre blew. The speedo was showing over 105 mph at the time. Dan tried to bring the car off the top of the banking but a wheel dug in and the back end came round, and that was it. We had a load of filled sandbags in the back, and it was said that one of these had shifted and knocked open Dan’s seat belt. In those days the latches were aircraft-type lift-up jobs. Dan was thrown out on the first roll but I stayed strapped in for the ride, and was still in when the car finally bounced to a stop. It was a good thing I was, because I’m sure that if I’d gone out I’d have been crushed.
“Dan suffered three broken ribs and a broken leg and I cut my head badly on the sun visor bracket. The doctors said that my shoulder blades had actually been pushed together and had touched, and it was a miracle they hadn’t severed my spine. I felt like I’d been hit by a train but I was discharged that evening and went home. Meanwhile, Bernard Poole and Bill Morby had rushed from the factory to tell [my wife] Lesley about the accident and take her to the hospital, but unfortunately by the time they got there I’d already left for home, so I had to sit on the doorstep and wait for her to come back and let me in! I was off work for three months, and even today my neck still locks in position sometimes and needs a good crack to free it up!”
Colin had only started his job as a mileage driver at Land Rover that year, 1972, and he’d just been part of a spectacular accident that he felt very lucky to have survived. “It did make me ask myself whether I wanted to continue,” he says. “But this was my dream job and I decided to stick with it. It was a shame that we’d just written-off one of the 20 pre-production Range Rovers that were built for the 1970 press launch, though! There was some gossip afterwards that Michelin
had said they’d calculated the load on the back tyre at speed on the top of the banking was over 70 tons, and they’d found the mark of a wood screw on the tyre that blew, although I can’t really believe there would have been a screw on the MIRA test track. But it was only hearsay as far as I was concerned, and I never saw anything official about it.
“I’d been a keen Land Rover fan since I was a lad, and I’d entered my first trial in 1957 at the age of 16. My brother and I both entered in WJW 957, which was our dad’s 2.0-litre Series II. He was a keen caravanner and there were a lot of people in the Midland Rover Owners’ Club that worked at Solihull, and always plenty of Land Rovers around.
“A few years later I was working for a company that delivered petrol to the Austin factory at Longbridge, and I bumped into Dennis Patstone who was working there. I knew Dennis from the caravanning and he told me that he’d just been offered a job as a mileage driver with Land Rover at Solihull, and that sounded like my perfect job. I told him that if any vacancies came up I’d be very interested, and thought no more of it.
“A year or two later I was working as a welder at John Thompson Motor Pressings Ltd, who had the contract to manufacture the chassis for the Range Rover. We’d work from Monday to Thursday fabricating the chassis components and then on Friday they’d all go into a jig and an automated welder was supposed to weld all the parts together. It never really worked properly so my job was to make good the welding before the finished chassis were delivered to Solihull. We were supposed to make around 100 a week but I reckon we were doing more like 25!
“In those days a lot of the jobs at Rover and Land Rover were given out to the family and friends of the people who were already working there, so it was always good to have contacts. One day Dennis called me to ask if I was still interested in a job as a mileage driver and of course I said yes, and I was told that I’d get a call about it from the foreman, Ken Twist. I didn’t
“I’d been a keen Land Rover fan since I was a lad, and I’d entered my first trial in 1957 at 16. My brother and I entered in our dad’s 2.0 Series II. There was always plenty of Land Rovers around ”
hear anything and it turned out that Ken thought that Dennis was arranging things, and Dennis thought that Ken was! Once the confusion was sorted out I went along for an interview with Bill Turner, and all he said to me was ‘when do you want to start? Is Monday all right?’ I told him I had to give a month’s notice at Thompsons but he told me to turn up on Monday anyway. I later found out that he’d called the foreman at Thompsons – everyone knew everyone in those days – and agreed with him that I wouldn’t serve my notice because I’d be starting the following Monday at Land Rover. That’s how it was back then!
“I joined a small team of mileage drivers under Ken Twist. As well as Dennis there was Brian Goodchild, Alan Winter and, of course, Dan Archer, while Bill Morby was responsible for recovery and drove ‘Buttercup’, the 112-inch Forward Control prototype that is today preserved in the British Motor Museum at Gaydon. We were all allocated to the Land Rover side of the business and at that time the car side had their own mileage drivers, although around the time that the Rover SD1 saloon was being developed the two teams were combined.
“Dennis had volunteered to join the team that took the two Engineering Prototype Range Rovers on the Sahara Trials in late 1969 and he was the only mileage driver in the Land Rover team on that expedition, which I think was the company’s first overseas vehicle testing programme. I’d always wondered whether I’d get the opportunity to get involved in something like that, but one of my first jobs was working with Dennis on the military trials of the 101 Forward Control and the 109 Truck Cab. I spent a lot of time at Bagshot doing the rough road driving, at Long Valley and at Long Cross driving the pavé and setts, and we had a number of electrical problems with the 101 and the stub axle broke on the 109.
“In the mid-1970s I had my first taste of overseas adventure when I was part of the team on the Dutch military trials of the Series III 88-inch diesel and the diesel-powered Lightweight. And in 1980 I spent three weeks in Hondo, Texas, on the hot climate trials for the new 110. One of our test vehicles was delivered with no oil in the gearbox and of course no-one on the team in Texas thought they needed to check something as basic as oil in the gearbox. It lasted for 500 miles before it seized! Once we’d completed the trials we then spent a week driving to New York. I forged a lot of friendships on that trip and remained in touch for years with some of the Americans that we met.
“A lot of the job was much more routine, though, and involved testing vehicles on the road. We had a number of circuits that we would drive, and my regular route was the North Route which was around 400 miles long. From Solihull we’d head north on the M1 and M62 to Oldham and from there across Saddleworth Moor to Holmfirth, and then back across Holme Moss to Glossop, then over the Snake Pass and Mam Tor and down to Chapel-en-le-frith. From there we’d head south to Buxton, Leek, and then Ashbourne and back north to Buxton via the Longnor loop.
“We had a variation on this which we called the Peak Route which was around 230 miles long that we used for testing low-range, and a route in the Cotswolds through Stowe, Cirencester and Birdlip which was for running-in. There was also a long South Route but that was used mainly by the car side of the business. Testing was done both day and night and some of the drivers weren’t too keen on the night turns, although I found they suited me well and I swapped with the other drivers to do their night runs. Most of the time I drove the North and Peak Routes, although occasionally I’d have a running-in turn on the Cotswold circuit. Lesley was working as a teacher at the time and she always used to joke that we’d pass in the morning on the stairs, as she was coming down to get ready for work and I’d be heading up to go to bed!
“Each night there would be up to four drivers out and we all did the circuits the same way. And it never stopped, really, even during the periods when the factories were shut down due to the all-too-frequent strikes in the 1970s. During one of
“One of the routine hazards of the job was when the police showed an interest. This was particularly important to me because I intended to drive as hard and fast as I could”
these strikes we actually decamped to the Pirelli factory and continued our testing programme from there.
“In the early years the vehicles we were testing were rarely fitted with any kind of camouflage, and I think it was the Project Jay prototypes that were the first to be fitted with panels that were designed to hide the shape of the vehicle. Four of us in the mileage team were taken into a secure building at the factory one day to look at the first Jay vehicles, and a week later we were out testing them. In fact, I was the first mileage driver to take out a Jay, and I was always accompanied by a back-up vehicle that was usually a Morris Marina estate. The Jay prototypes were quickly christened the ‘Breadvans’ because of their disguises but I always found this quite funny because anyone who got close enough could immediately see that the vehicle was based on Range Rover underpinnings.
“One of the routine hazards of the job was when the police showed an interest, and this was particularly important to me because I tended to drive as hard and fast as I could, while others in the team were more respectful of the speed limits! There was one particular constable on the Longnor loop who would come after us with the blue lights flashing on his Ford Escort and we’d slow down to let him catch up before we pulled over. It was always the same and he’d tell us it was a quiet night and he’d just stopped us for a chat, and after ten or 15 minutes we’d be on our way!
“There was a rather more serious incident when we were testing the Jay prototypes one night on the North Route and we were pulled over by the local constabulary. Quite often the boys in blue would just want a sneaky peek at whatever it was we were testing, but on this occasion one of the officers took a few photos. We told him that this really wasn’t on but he insisted that they were just for his use, but once we were back at Solihull we mentioned it in the report we completed after every drive. I heard later that the company took a very dim view of this and contact was made at the highest levels to get the photographs returned.
“After the Land Rover and the Rover car mileage teams were combined, I often found myself at the wheel of a Rover saloon. One night I was in an SD1 and had stopped at Ashbourne to fill up with petrol. We carried our own supply in the boot so that we could avoid stopping at petrol stations and when I got back in the car I couldn’t find the keys. Alan Winter set off for the factory in his Rover P6 3500 to get some help while I fumbled around looking for the keys, which after ten minutes I eventually found under the carpet in the boot, where they must have fallen out of my pocket while I was getting out the petrol cans. I set off after Alan at full pelt, and after a while I could see his tail lights appearing and disappearing on the road ahead. I eventually caught him up near Lichfield and he couldn’t believe that I’d done that. I just told him that my SD1 was obviously quicker than his P6!
“As a mileage driver I drove every model of Land Rover from the earliest Range Rovers, the Series III, the 101 including the infamous powered trailer, the Stage I 109, the 110 and the 90, and the earliest Discoverys. I remember noting in my report after some lengthy drives in the Stage I V8 that I thought we might have solved the fuel crisis, which was a hot topic in those days when the tensions in the Middle East had led to a massive increase in petrol prices in the UK. Given that on my night time runs I had been getting 10 mpg if I was lucky, I suggested that if we kept driving them there would be no fuel left to worry about!
“One of the most interesting times during my years as a mileage driver was the Beaver Bullet programme in 1986, when a group of Solihull employees came together as volunteers determined to prove that the recently-launched Range Rover Turbo D was an accomplished vehicle. It had been trashed on the BBC’S Top Gear programme and we were determined to set the record straight. The idea was to prepare two vehicles for an attempt on various diesel vehicle records and I volunteered to become one of the six drivers.
“In the run up to the attempt on the records, I and the other five drivers did a great deal of practice driving at MIRA to ensure we were all confident driving the bank at high speed during
“As a mileage driver I drove every model of Land Rover from the earliest Range Rovers, the Series III, the 101 including the infamous powered trailer, the 110 and 90 and earliest Discos”
the hours of darkness, and I’d leave the factory in whatever vehicle I was mileage-testing at the time, divert to MIRA, put in a few hours of testing on the endurance vehicle, and then head off to complete my 400 mile test drive. I did that for a couple of nights a week for a fortnight!
“Over an intense but very successful August weekend at MIRA we took a raft of sprint and endurance national records in the diesel-engined 2.0- to 3.0-litre class, including taking the 24-hour endurance speed record to over 100 mph for the first time, and I was delighted to have been a part of it all. There was a real team spirit and everyone involved contributed to the overall success. When LRM arranged a reunion of the Bullet team in 2018 I went along and it was funny to hear my old team mates talking about the amount of unpaid time they’d put in. I should probably have kept quiet but I piped-up to tell them that I’d been paid for both my hours on the practice driving and for my time over the record-breaking weekend. None of them knew about it and I must admit there were one or two ripe comments directed at me!”
In 1987 the mileage driving team was relocated from Solihull to Gaydon together with the rest of the Engineering team, and Colin didn’t really want to make the move. He transferred to join the Press Fleet under John O’donnell which remained at Solihull, where he spent his time runningin fleet vehicles and delivering them to various events. He soon found himself being regularly called upon by Roger Crathorne to help out with Roger’s Demonstrations team, and this ended up with Colin transferring to Roger’s team full time.
“It was quite a small team and I can remember that in the early years we were housed under the stairs in the Engineering block at Solihull! We were responsible for taking our exhibition units and demonstration vehicles to dealer events and things like agricultural shows, and from relatively humble beginnings we soon grew to become one of the UK’S most highly-regarded display teams. The company invested in some phenomenal rigs that would allow us to display Land Rovers high above the crowds on huge girder structures, and I ended up being responsible for driving the customised arctic units all over Europe, transporting the display rigs.
“It could be quite a task at times, because we were forced to fit in with the show organisers’ plans, so I’d end up doing things like driving a rig to Scotland and then driving it down to Cornwall a couple of days later, and then after that show had ended having to drive back north for another show in Scotland. We were also involved in all the new vehicle launches including the days when the press were invited to drive the new vehicles, and those were always interesting! During the launch of the 90 at Eastnor, for example, I had to drive all the vehicles that had been damaged by the press during the day back to Solihull for repair, and ensure they were back on parade at Eastnor the following day.
“And then there was the event at Blair Atholl in the Scottish Highlands where we discovered that every vehicle that came back from driving the demonstration circuit across the hills had suffered damage to the alloy wheels. Roger took me to one side and said ‘you know what you’ve got to do, don’t you?’ and I did! He wanted me to drive the circuit and find the rock that was obviously to blame for the wheel damage, and deal with it. Dick Anderton and I drove over 25 miles of the off-road route before we found it, and it was a small nib of rock hidden in the heather beside the track. We knew it was the right rock because it was surrounded by chips of alloy wheel rim. It turned out to be a very big rock, though, and it took us quite a while to dig it out and move it!
“We also attended the big Val D’isère 4x4 show in the Alps a few times, which was always enjoyable, as well as many UK Land Rover shows such as Billing. In fact, the show at Billing in 2002 was my last one before I formally retired from Land Rover in 2002, although it was marked by an unfortunate incident when I reversed a Defender into one of the exhibition Discoverys. Roger Crathorne presented me with a framed certificate for what he described as my ‘Amazing Spatial Awareness Skills, Insurance Form Avoidance and for Generally Passing the Buck’! I was also given a wonderful
leaving gift which is a wooden plinth with a pewter scale model of a Defender 110 with its rear end embedded in the side of a Discovery, which caused a great deal of amusement when it was handed over! But after I’d retired Roger brought me back as a contractor and I spent another three years with the team, which had now transformed itself into the Land Rover Experience, before finally deciding in 2005 to pack it in.”
As well as spending over 30 years with the company, Land Rovers have also dominated Colin’s family life. “I’ve always had Land Rovers,” says Colin, “and I always will. As a family we were regular participants in off-road trials competitions and used our vehicles to tow our caravan to and from an event, and I’ve owned many vehicles over the years. I had an 80-inch for a while and modified that with a rear-mounted V8, and that was exchanged for a 1973 Range Rover which we eventually turned into an 88-inch hybrid.
“In 1975 I also bought one of the pre-production Velars from the company when they’d finished with it. That was YVB 156H and we used it for holidays in the UK and on the Continent and it was also the course car in a couple of rallies, including the 1976 Castrol Rally. Unfortunately, Lesley was involved in an accident with a skip lorry shortly afterwards, and the car was declared a write-off. I bought it back from the insurers, dismantled it and sold off the parts. The chassis was bent one foot sideways at the front but I still found a buyer for it! With the values of pre-pro Range Rovers going sky-high over recent years, I’d probably have been better leaving the wreck in the garage!
Today, that garage still houses two comp safari vehicles that are run by Colin and Lesley’s son, Ben, who competes with considerable success as a member of the Peak & Dukeries Land Rover Club. “They’re in our blood,” says Colin, “as we walk past his two Discoverys and he shows me around the garage. And right now I can’t wait to see the new Defender, and I’m sure there will be one on the driveway pretty soon!”