What, you thought the hype campaign for
the Range Rover Sport
would calm down a bit now the thing is 'out there' and done with the whole motor show/embargo/celebrity launch event
fuss and nonsense
Spitfire takes off at 80mph; what about the Sport?
Still, you can't fault Land Rover for coming up with inventive ways of having fun with the
510hp supercharged Sport
Pikes Peak
for a production car record looked like a giggle, even if it's no longer gravel at the top, somewhat diluting the 4x4 message a bit.
And in a new pre-Festival of Speed, pre-public (official) 'dynamic debut', one of those spurious Top Gear-esque races has been held on the adjacent Goodwood airfield. Against a Spitfire. Despite its best efforts, even Land Rover can't hype the new Sport into the sky so the race was instead across Goodwood's bumpy grass strip and back with Mike Cross in the Land Rover and a chap named Matt Jones in the Spit.
What exactly do a Range Rover Sport and a Spitfire have in common? Well, beyond predictable 'best of British' stuff we'll dust off some plane-spotter's geekery and assert they're both based around aluminium monocoques. Which in their respective times puts them at a technological advantage over contemporaries - for context the (mainly) fabric and tubular frame Hurricane that fought alongside the Spitfire can be thought of as the body-on-frame equivalent of the previous Sport. They've both got superchargers. And they both sound pretty immense, though even the Range Rover has to concede on that score to the Spitfire's Rolls-Royce Merlin. Though the idea of the Range Rover with unsilenced stub exhausts does appeal.
Takatakatakataka!, etc...
Anyway, it is what it is. Which is to say a bit of harmless fun and nice way to carry on the weekend's sporting based patriotic fervour into the week in a most definitely PH-friendly way.