No other car has made me laugh out loud. How did it remain in production for 60 years? Four days ago I had never sat in one. Now I am addicted. Crack must be like this.
Last night’s journey to the pub took me down a road that transfers holiday makers from the North Devon trunk road to their holidays in Ilfracombe and Woolacombe. It’s a fantastic driver’s road constantly turning, climbing, and descending. In my 911 I set a lively pace. If you aren’t a local in a performance car you won’t keep up. I wanted to see how the Defender would perform. A gaggle of cars turned off behind me and we entered the circuit. With traffic sticking to my tail, I had to use all my local knowledge just to stay alive. It was like flying a WW2 bomber with one wing shot away and four Messerschmidt’s on my tail. I was weaving, corkscrewing, nursing the engine, yawing, and swaying. The road wheels were permanently behind or in front of the instructions sent from the steering wheel, leaving us on a course that was the mean average between corrections. My heart was racing. To my right a rock face. To my left a steep ravine. I was concentrating so hard I bit my lip until it bled. The Land Rover was creaking, rattling, and protesting, throwing in a new noise now and then that sounded like another thing falling off or coming apart. And. Maybe it was.
I was relieved to turn off at Brayford. Only in a Land Rover can you be that close to death while being so far within the speed limit. Down the pub two local farmers confirmed the dangers. Both had stories that ended upside down in a Land Rover. They were interested in my verdict on this strange machine. You can judge a man by his Land Rover opinion. I said, “Well, once you get used to it, I can see they have their place”. They nodded agreement. A fair summary. And, who was I to criticise? Over sixty years all its key faults have been carefully preserved. It’s proven.
When I left the pub I stepped out into a pitch-black Exmoor night. Finding the Land Rover wasn’t easy. I got there by touch. Feeling my way along the lane eliminating parked tractors, quad bikes, horses, until I felt the unmistakable externally hinged door. I opened it and the courtesy light… didn’t. The world stayed black. I had an open door, in theory I could get in, but I couldn’t see a thing. Even in the light, getting in presented problems. The seat is quite high up and if enough forward momentum isn’t maintained as you leap up from the footplate you fall back down. To avoid embarrassment I had been practicing at home. But I hadn’t practiced with my eyes shut so getting in in a dark country lane was like jumping into a random black hole. I made it. Once inside I had to feel my way around my key ring until I found a shape that felt 20 years old. When I was certain I had it, I hunted for the ignition. Everything was taking time. I found it and turned on the headlights. This was like the moment in ET when the spaceship lit up. It’s the one feature that is world class. The road in front was floodlit. I needed sunglasses. Main beam was even brighter. They might not know much but these Land Rover boys know how to light a landscape I thought. I laughed. Again.
As I pulled away and plotted a route home via deserted narrow lanes where slow speeds are not publicly humiliating, I became unsettled by a sense of being followed. In my rear view mirror the road behind seemed as bright as the road in front. I switched to dipped beam and the road behind got darker, on main beam it got brighter again. Who was this maniac matching me move for move? I started to feel like Dennis Weaver in “Duel” when he is followed by a demonic truck. My tiny brain wrestled with this while also trying to keep the wheels on the road. Maybe I wasn’t being followed. Maybe the light illusion was because my main beam was mis-wired and turning on my reversing light. Nah, that didn’t fit the story. Then I noticed my rear-view mirror was showing a pair of windscreen wipers and also, the road behind seemed very similar to the road in front. When I moved my head the person in the car behind moved their head. I sussed it. The rear view mirror was showing a reflection of the forward view projected onto the glass of the back door. I really laughed at that. Then at slow speed in the safety of a dark deserted country lane I experimented to see if I could drive the car by getting my forward view from the rear-view mirror. It wasn’t easy, despite the speed of light there was a lag, but it was possible. I laughed again. How could they sell something like this?.
The reflection was clear because the cabin was so dark. The dashboard light was too dull to see anything inside. Finding the gearstick was like blind man’s buff. Once I let go of it there was a lot of flapping around trying to find it again. I couldn’t leave one hand on it as two hands are required to steer. But the most hilarious feature of the day was the pedal lock. This is an anti-theft device made of metal that covers all three pedals and then locks itself on one of them so the vehicle can’t be driven away. It was a very sturdy item made by no nonsense folk from Yorkshire. It took a few minutes to wedge it into the footwell over the pedals, then I turned the key and it locked it in place. Without the key there was no hope of removing it. Actually, with the key there was no hope of removing it. When I unlocked it the catch didn’t release its grip on the pedals. The best engineering minds in Yorkshire had designed it to be the same dimensions as the footwell, which is why it had taken so long to lock in position in the first place. The car was trapped, hostage to a bright yellow quarter inch thick steel box. I rattled it, pushed it from side to side, yanked it up and down but it wouldn’t let go. After 45 minutes I was desperate enough to contemplate getting the angle grinder and cutting the box up, but I finally got there by turning myself upside down in the drivers seat, and then squeezing my torso and head under the steering wheel to take a photo from behind the box to see where the catch was stuck and then using that insider knowledge, levering it out with a breaker bar (which is like a crow bar but bigger). No wonder it had an Amazon 5-star rating. I couldn’t nick my own car, even with the keys. I showed them the photo down the pub. No sympathy there. They suggested a dead sheep or ferocious dog in the back works much better.
