MARCELLO GANDINI
How do you please a man like Gandini? We head to Turin to hear his thoughts on Lambo’s latest masterpiece and more
how well engineered it feels. It’s not euro-sophisticated, but the panels insulate well (only whistling in strong crosswinds), the Goodyears are quiet and although it patters on most surfaces and big hits to the rear wheels are transmitted into the heavy back axle and shudder into the car, it doesn’t destabilise things. You’re not having to constantly correct wayward steering. The front end tracks straight and true.
Handy north of Roswell as I reckon there’s not a single corner before our overnight stop another 140 miles distant that I can’t steer with my knees. We stop as the sun drops and find a dirt road, just to kick up a rooster. I take out the roof panels, but only the front two fit in the boot with all our gear. Airflow is not managed at all, but who cares? The centre section and whole rear come off too, and for the full surf truck experience all the doors unbolt. And whole bumper sections, front wings, wheelarch extensions. You can basically dismantle your Bronco. Best leave the leftovers somewhere secure. We nearly forget the centre panel, used as a drone landing pad.
We wake up to mountains. If I’d run a finger along the horizon last night, they would have been tiny braille bumps, far away and bleached peach by sunset. They must’ve closed in after dark. A palette of brown, of soil and earth and scrub, has become green, lush pastures, moss, trees. The sense of emptiness has gone. It’s trite to say that Texas is huge, flat and open, but here’s a measure of how much space there is. There’s no knock down and rebuild. When a building outlives its usefulness it’s just abandoned, a replacement erected somewhere in the vicinity. We passed endless shacks, presumably the original farmhouses, now tumbled into ruins.
There’s less of that now, a greater sense of preservation at this, the south-east corner of the Rockies. Proper roads, proper curves, inclines and elevations that ask more of the car. It doesn’t have all the answers. The engine, smooth and muscular where it matters, is good, with enough thump to make the top spec Bronco feel significantly lighter than its 2,321kg kerbweight. But the 10-speed auto is slow and slurs, quick kickdowns quite beyond it, manual control only via an awkward switch on the side of the gearlever. A seven-speed manual is available with the four-cylinder. All things considered, nah, probably not.
The Sasquatch pack adds 35-inch tyres, electronic diff locks, Bilstein shocks, raised suspension and more. It’s the Bronco in its least tarmac-friendly guise. And yet the independent front suspension allows you to place the car accurately, to steer without having to take second bites at the wheel through corners. I expected vagueness and squidge, and while hardly tactile or incisive, it makes a decent fist of corners. Both brakes and throttle are sharp, the Bilsteins manage roll well, it copes.
Tell you what though, these balloon tyres don’t half contain a lot of air. The frantic hissing started several hundred yards back and shows no sign of letting up. Taos, New Mexico is something of an off-road mecca. I’d scouted Red River Pass, a trail that hairpinned high into the mountains. We’d swung off the tarmac, I’d twisted the console mode dial to Baja, automatically engaging four-wheel drive, and off we’d gone. It was narrow and loose, in places rockfalls had clearly tumbled across the track, sweeping away vegetation, forcing me to sashay a somewhat vertiginous edge, but the Bronco was taking everything it faced in its stride. Confidence growing, I decided to pick up the pace. And then the hissing began.
“Puncture,” said Dave matter-of-factly.
“Maybe it’s just a leaf caught in...”, I replied.
“No, puncture, we need to turn round and get back down fast.” Less matter-of-fact now, but then it was all happening on Dave’s side, the hissing and the vertical drop.
We sweep into trees and the track opens out, so we pull over and take stock. A sharp rock has sliced deep between the tread blocks. But that’s fine: whacking great spare on the back door, a jack under the boot floor...
It’s a scissor jack, one of those poxy little ones they put in superminis. With an extension plate to make it Bronco-sized.
I’m not convinced it’s man enough for the job, so we lift it the old-fashioned way: run the front wheel up a bank until the rear waggles in the air. The bolts aren’t done up too tight, not a locking wheelnut in sight and I manage to heave, what, 35kg of wheel and tyre about without herniating a disc. As I fasten the busted rubber back on, it’s still hissing.
085
“THE BRONCO IS CLOSE TO UNSTOPPABLE IN THE ROUGH”
The situation curtails the fun slightly. I can’t risk another issue up here and we haven’t seen another person in half an hour, but I’m convinced that continuing to climb will be worth it. It is. The land opens up, the trails split into an off-road playground: fast tracks, axle twists, heavy roots, near vertical slopes. The Bronco makes mincemeat of it all thanks to some very clever tricks. A row of rubberised buttons tops the dash, allowing me to lock the front and rear differentials, to hydraulically disconnect the front anti-roll bar to improve axle articulation, to lock the inside rear wheel to enable tighter turns on the loose. And it all works, can be operated on the fly (OK, low range requires neutral). The Bronco is close to unstoppable in the rough. It’s more mechanical than a Defender, more connected to what’s happening at the wheels. And you can take the panels off to buff out the damage afterwards. Here’s the feel and feedback I was after – it doesn’t clank or lurch, just picks its way reassuringly over everything in its path. Special mention for the one-pedal mode. Much like in an electric car, lifting the throttle applies the brakes – very handy for precisely controlling your speed.
Americans love their hardcore, heavy duty, gulch-crawling rigs and Ford expects many buyers to use the standard car as a jumping off point. There are 200 dealer accessories to choose from, and a row of auxiliary switches up by the mirror should you fit a winch, lightbar, CB radio, electrified roofrack or whatever.
Screens adjust to the mode you’re in (seven to choose from, never bothered with Eco), you get useful camera views, but mainly the Bronco is simple and logical to operate. The GOAT modes (Goes Over Any Type of Terrain, rather than Greatest of All Time, although I’m sure Ford wouldn’t mind you getting that wrong), are very similar to Land Rover’s Terrain Response, but they work. There’s space and storage and this $62,605-as-tested First Edition has plenty of toys that makes it look decent value to my eyes.
Out here many disagree, including the bloke leading a conga line of ATVs through the rough, “First one I’ve seen man, love it, but it’s sooo much money.” A base three-door starts at $29,995, the fivedoor $5k more. You don’t get much on those, but in sterling that’s a starting price in line with a well-specced Fiesta. There are one or two issues with the interior. The Brady bunch may have praised quality, but to a European eye the plastics are still rickety. It’s quite a hop up into the cabin and while the grab handle might be well integrated, it’s in the wrong place to help you. The instrument display is poor, the second row sits much higher than the first and struggles for headroom, the side-opening tailgate means you lift the glass separately.
We regain the tarmac without further puncturing, heading down from Bobcat Pass to drift north across the high plains, where we watch heavy squalls come at us from miles away. Great blobs of rain crack against the windscreen with similar violence and frequency to yesterday’s Texan bugs. Only this time I don’t need to stop and scrub with Sprite and a rag to see where I’m going. It’s when we hit the I-25 highway that I realise how much of the 1,100 miles we’ve covered so far has been on single lane roads. There’s more traffic, the land’s character – and my connection to it – is lessened.
The road up Pikes Peak is much more than 12.42 miles long. The race start is getting on for halfway up. It’s not a hillclimb first and foremost, it’s a tourist trail, nose to tail puffing cars full of wheezing occupants. Following minivans at 25mph is not the adventurous finale I had in mind, especially when the summit proves to be a chilly building site swathed in fog. So I descend a bit, park and wait for the Peak rangers to send me on my way. Out through the upright windscreen I see bare mountain, rock, trees like bristles on a toothbrush, all America laid out below.
The Bronco is just the sort of car to conquer this territory. That it’ll prove a big hit across these United States I have no doubt, that it’s been so emphatically designed for here is equally obvious. It looks brilliant, has real ability. Much more bandwidth than a Wrangler, but like Jeep’s old-timer it’s too compromised for a British audience bred on modern Land Rovers. If it came to us I can’t see it repeating the Mustang’s success. Ford does something called the Bronco Sport out here. A Kuga-sized school run device that has most of the looks, but little of the ability – that would work for us.
But mainly I’m just happy Ford has been true to the Bronco’s roots. It’s no retro-pastiche. If I’ve learned one thing from people along the way it’s that authenticity counts, and they consider this to be made of the right stuff. The rangers arrive, mainly for a look-see. “We want one of these so bad it hurts,” one says. “Any idea how long the wait is?” I tell him I believe it stretches well into next year and that a man in Brady, Texas is way ahead of them in the queue.
“I HAVE NO DOUBT THE BRONCO WILL PROVE A BIG HIT ACROSS THE US”