A good restoration story is to car enthusiasts what pet rescue videos are to most other people. Funny how a moon-mile car with a few spots of bubbling paintwork can be a major turn-off for buyers, but a car that’s been left to rust away in the depths of a dank old barn will have restorers reaching for their wallets. Thank goodness there are people out there skilled and brave enough to undertake such extensive restorations, because it’s led to a booming restomod market and has even convinced some carmakers to get in on the act themselves.
Case in point: the Land Rover Reborn we have here. Built to showcase the handiwork of JLR’s rebranded Classic division in 2016, the Reborn was a run of 25 Series I Land Rovers that were comprehensively restored to an as-new standard. And my, did the company have its work cut out. The Series Is that passed through Classic workshop made the mouldy rust buckets you see rotting in the middle of a field look positively concours grade. This was a restoration in the truest sense, with cars chosen based on their ‘authenticity’, and some barely capable of standing on their own four wheels. But that was the whole point of the programme - to prove Land Rover Classic could bring cars back from the dead.
The restoration process therefore needed to be thorough, leaving no corroded body panels unturned. Once a donor car was sourced for a customer, the crack team at Land Rover Classic began by cross-examining each car with its original build specs to see what, if anything, could be kept. The team said it retained as many original parts as possible to ‘continue the story’ of the donor car, but there’s only so much ice blasting and reupholstering can do, so anything deemed beyond restoration was exchanged for a like-for-like replacement.
Moreover, each engine was put through an equally rigorous restoration process, including a full teardown and reassembly (can’t imagine many were in working order). Once the chassis and oily bits were shipshape, the team set about reapplying period-correct badging, trim and paintwork. Even the smallest of components, right down to the screws that held the badges in place, had to be produced to the same visual standard as those used on the original cars. The programme was an exercise in authenticity, with the only options buyers could specify being the colour of their choice - so long as it was one of the original five schemes.
Unless, of course, you asked very nicely and presented a briefcase stuffed with cash. This example, a Series I 80, has a few ‘special additions’ such as a heater, tan leather seats, extra seating in the rear and rubber mats to stop the freshly painted floors from getting scuffed up. The rest of the car, however, is as it would have been when it rolled off the factory floor in 1950, including the headlamps tucked behind the grille (1951 models had cutouts for the larger lights) and interior door handles. No USB charger in sight, nor is there anywhere to store your iPhone. It's a time-warp in almost its truest sense.
An expensive one, too. Land Rover never revealed how much a Reborn cost when ‘new’ in 2016, but an asking price of £129,950 for this example suggests it wasn’t cheap. This one is a bit more special than the others being the last of the original run of 25 (Land Rover going on to produce more thanks to high customer demand). Not hard to imagine why, because this is simply exquisite. If that's out of reach, you can pick up this restored 1949 car for half the price, and it does look to have been put together to an equally high standard. But does this car’s last-of-line status and pedigree warrant the extra cost? Over to you…
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