Mud, munitions and moonlight
2017 Range RoveR velaR mark dixon
I can only apologise to the valeters at Jaguar Land Rover, but there was a good reason why the Velar’s carpets were plastered with mud. Two years ago, my partner Paula and I did our first World War One remembrance tour in France with Battlefields By 4x4 (www.battlefieldsby4x4.com), a small company run by guys who work for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. On that occasion we visited the Somme, and it was one of the most emotional weekends either of us has ever experienced. With 2018 marking the 100th anniversary of the end of the Great War, we decided we had to return in this year of all years and elected to take part in a tour centred around Arras, capital of the Pas-de-Calais region.
The unique feature of these tours is that you bring your own 4x4 – or, in this case, one of JLR’s – so that you can drive the ‘green lanes’ that criss-cross the French countryside and which take you right into the heart of the WW1 battlefields. Evidence of the conflict is still being ploughed up every year, and it’s not uncommon to find live munitions – like the British shell pictured opposite – propped up at the side of the road with typical French laissez-faire, awaiting collection by the bomb disposal squads. Sooner or later.
I could sense a slight scepticism among our fellow tourists when we turned up in a posh machine like the Velar, a scepticism that turned to laughter when it was discovered that the Velar’s aluminium body and panoramic glass sunroof meant that the macho magnetic aerial for our loaned CB radio (necessary both for route instructions and for the running commentary about the horrors and the heroism that these now-sleepy fields and villages witnessed a century ago) wouldn’t stick anywhere. A small aerial that clips over a window glass had to be rustled up instead, and I was humorously referred to as ‘Mark with the Tiny Aerial’ thereafter.
Over the course of a long weekend, our guides packed in a huge range of activities: visits not just to the battlefields but also to
museums such as the amazing underground chalk quarry tunnels at Arras, which were used by Allied troops during WW1 and have been largely untouched since. We were invited to join a Remembrance Day ceremony with the inhabitants of Monchy-Le Preux – where yours truly had the honour of joining the village mayor in laying wreaths side-by-side – but the highlight was a candle-lit ceremony at Houdain Lane military cemetery (above), only accessible by muddy field tracks, like so many of these wartime burial grounds. Standing in silence as the Last Post sounded, while a biting wind moaned eerily across the flat, empty, inky-black farmland, was a moving and spooky experience.
‘Our’ Velar was fitted with JLR’s Ingenium diesel, which proved a frugal and willing companion. A two-litre, four-cylinder diesel may not seem terribly Range Rover but on the move there’s no noticeable lack of refinement; only when the engine abruptly kicks in as part of the automatic stop-start system are you reminded what fuels it. Interestingly, this rudeness, plus a noticeable lag when trying to make a sharp getaway, have been addressed in the new Evoque mild hybrid – see below.
The Velar’s interior is gorgeous to look at, all soft-touch fabrics and uncluttered touchscreens, but it’s not beyond criticism. JLR uses screens that aren’t haptic – they don’t provide a click or other positive response when you touch them – so if a ‘button’ doesn’t react to your initial touch, as can happen often, then you may not notice. And the rotating knob that controls the excellent Terrain Response system – a series of driveline programmes for dealing with different kinds of off-road challenges – needs much more positive detents to be used intuitively in the heat of serious off-roading. It’s all too easy to overshoot the programme you want without realising it.
Serious off-roading? In a Velar? Well, yes. Despite this car being shod with rubber-band 265/45x21 tyres, and it lacking the optional height-adjustable air suspension, it dealt superbly well with extremely slippery muddy tracks – so slippery, in fact, that a Discovery 3 had to be towed up a short slope which the Velar had waltzed up just moments earlier. Towards the end of the weekend, several of our more hardcore Land Roverowning companions commented on how impressively the Velar had performed. As one remarked, ‘It was the surprise of the weekend.’