Features: Freelander in the desert

It’s early November and the weather is just glorious. Obviously I’m not in Ireland. I am within the walls of the Medina in the 18th century city of Essaouira on the coast of Morocco. As I wander through the old city, breathing in the fresh air of a city free of traffic I take in the splendour of a UNESCO World Heritage city and have one of those ‘how did I end up here?’ moments.

By Brian Twomey.

A group of world-weary Land Rover personnel are in Morocco to launch the new Freelander 2. The Freelander is the type of car that, for all its 4x4xfar virtues, is as likely to be inching down the M50 or circling Dublin city centre vainly looking for a parking as any other family orientated 4x4. Land Rover has brought us here to show us otherwise, that life with a Freelander doesn’t have to be like that and that the genes that made the Defender the chosen car for explorers still live on in their smallest, most practical car.

So to business. I commandeer the keys to a Freelander from one of the Land Rover girls and take to the roads leading from the isolated tarmac that passes for an airport here. The petrol Freelander is a 3.2 litre item, a straight-six that Land Rover say they co-developed with Volvo and tuned to their own requirements. It’s in the Freelander to try an convert Americans who never liked the last car. Oddly, this engine is mounted longitudally and produces 231bhp which it sends to all the wheels through a six-speed automatic gearbox with the now obligatory sporty sequential gear change option. It’s not a slow car, 0-100km/h in a claimed 8.9 seconds and 200km/h flat out, but it wouldn’t pin you in your seat in the way you’d think a big engine in a fairly small car would. It is very smooth, quiet and quite responsive but a bit blighted by the gearbox which is a touch slow to down-change when you ease the throttle down. This is a pity because generally the self-shifter is well mannered and unobtrusive.

I’d go for option B; the cheap and more economical 2.2 diesel. Two less cylinders and 160bhp mean that the Freelander is slower here but the precise six-speed manual gearbox and 400Nms of torque more then compensate. The chassis feels identical but the diesel trades high end power for low end torque making it smoother and more rewarding to drive across unpredictable terrain or twisty back roads. The smallest Land Rover is a remarkable achievement dynamically. The steering has decent levels of feel and the car responds sharply to steering inputs although Land Rover seem to making the steering in their newer models a lot lighter these days. Do the dog on it and it will push into very mild understeer but otherwise it is happy to do your bidding even at high cornering speeds. The only thing that distinguishes it as a 4x4 is the body roll which is modest by class standards but more dramatic than a similarly sized estate car.

The accomplishments of the engineers in making the Freelander drive this well is further reinforced when you venture off road. The local youth offering pale tourists a ride on his camel can’t compete with Hill Descent Control and the numerous settings Land Rover fit to everything above the Neolithic Defender. The bonnet vibrates as I strike the bottom of a sand dune with horrific force and sand is hurled over the car as it crests the top of it. The Freelander takes its punishment well although again the manual diesel wins out. To go dune bashing or rock climbing the automatic petrol has to spend a lot of time revving quite hard to maintain momentum. At one point the auto gearbox nagged that it was overheating. Admittedly a fair bit of abuse came its way but the manual diesel feels like it is suffering less in the rough stuff. In these conditions the Defender genes start to show through. As I bounce past a beached Freelander I find myself off-course, waste deep in sand at 60km/h and trying to gather it up before I drop down another dip. The sump on this thing must be yards thick…

The softness of the suspension and the sharpness of the steering come into play in the rough stuff. The ride quality is good on road but fantastic off it while the steering is always cooperating, never fighting a driver in extremis. Clamouring over rocks is impressive, if a trifle boring and to be honest I wouldn’t be risking my bling-bling alloys trying to find a shortcut onto Dollymount strand this way. That said, I spent a day trying to break a 3.2 petrol HSE and another day trying to demolish a 2.2 diesel HSE and the worst that happened was that a retaining clip under the bumper bent when I hit a 50 degree slope at national primary route speeds. I looked under the car expecting to see a puddle of oil and I got a blemish that a Pebble Beach Concours judge would miss. Not only is the off-road route Land Rover picked fun to cover but the Freelander is a fun car to do it in.

As the fleet of pre-production models sits outside the walls of the Medina, cooling in the late afternoon sunlight I step back from them. I admire the crisp, simple, conservative styling. The beautifully detailed, comfortable interior is a great venue for me to explore Africa for the first time, even if some of the fixtures don’t exactly look childproof. I admire the refinement and strength of the straight-six but to be honest I’d have the diesel as it feels more at home under the bonnet of the Freelander. My only problem is that back in Ireland I can’t think of anywhere I could use this amazing off-road ability and to buy one of these cars and never experience that would be a tremendous shame indeed.

Features: Discovering Iceland

By Neil Briscoe

Photos By Nick Dimblebly

It’s four in the morning and I’ve just crawled out from the frost-bound interior of my tent. The temperature gauge has hit –15 Celsius and I’ve lost most of the sensation in my nose and fingers, the only bits of skin that were protruding from the enveloping warmth of my sleeping bag.


My deep-frozen bladder has woken me and informed that unless I stagger across to the only slightly warmer toilet, there’s going to be a and icicle accident in the tent. Outside, the quiet is all-pervading, the kind of silence you just don’t get in our crowded island.  Above, the night sky is filled with stars, all far brighter and more intense, thanks to the fact that the nearest electric light is about 90km away. There are faint traces of the Aurora Borealis tinting narrow swathes of the sky a pale green and the air smells faintly of sulphur. I have never felt as remote or lonely in the universe as I have at that moment, camped out under the glories of the cosmos in one of the most astonishing landscapes this planet possesses; Iceland.

Stumbling across the small campsite, the line-up of Discoveries, all in silver, catches my tired, freezing eyes and the lonliness evaporates. It’s impossible to feel desolate when memories of river crossings, snow climbing and steep descents in the big, bluff Disco come flooding back. It’s rather like spotting your faithful horse, sleeping quietly next to the tent, preparing for the next adventure tomorrow.

And an adventure it most certainly was. The normal sequence of events for a media motoring event is fly in, drive the car, have a press conference, have a sleep and fly home again. Land Rover generally does things a little differently, but never before this different. Over the course of two days, we covered about 500km in the Discos, and a great deal of that was vertical. To illustrate the effort required, it took about 12 hours of hard driving to cover the first 250km. Iceland only has one proper, paved road; Highway 1, and once you’re off that it’s lava sand and river fords a-go-go.

This was not a new model launch. We drove the Discovery 3 last year and the car hasn’t changed since. This was more of a demonstration, a challenge. Just how far can you push a car on some of the most demanding terrain in the world before it squeaks and begs for mercy?  Further than you would ever imagine is the answer.

Iceland’s an interesting place. Despite the fact that there are areas of solid rock that are younger than me, it has some of the oldest culture going. In fact, Icelandic explorers set foot on North American soil some 400 years before Columbus was even thought of, and the first non-native child born on what would become American soil was Icelandic. The population is about twice that of Cork city but the country is home to the largest glacier in Europe, and is technically the furthest west point in Europe, although the residents of Dingle get rather miffed if you point that out to them.

More importantly for the purposes of this trip, that small population is mostly strung out along Iceland’s coast, leaving the centre of the country free for glaciers, mountains, lava fields and the kind of terrain that is a pure playground for Land Rovers.

The landscape ahead looks like a set from Lord Of The Rings and it’s sometimes hard to believe that you’re not some kind of CGI special effect, kicking up computer-created dust and snow plumes as you charge across the land. The mountains aren’t spectacularly massive, but they look foreboding and craggy, especially when the low winter sun lights up the rising curls of geothermal steam and it looks like the mountains are burning.

We’re high enough to be beyond the dusty gravel tracks now and are onto snow and ice-bound trails. River crossings are plentiful, about one every five minutes at one point, and one snow slope is so steep that the entire convoy has to be winched up. Getting the first car up was a real struggle, only achieved by one of the Land Rover experts taking a fast run and letting the momentum do the work that grip was shirking. Black lava dust was splattered liberally down the sides of all the cars and would by morning have become frozen solidly in place.  It took a solid hour of effort to get fifteen cars up a 100-metre slope. Now that is adventure driving as it should be…

Off roading is normally conducted at a gentle, almost walking, pace, the better to judge the ground and to avoid damaging the vehicle. Not this little expedition. We kept up speeds on stretches of gravel and snow that would boggle the mind of someone who hasn’t experienced the awesome capability of the Discovery. Bumps and jolts that would rip the suspension off a normal family car were soaked up and dealt with, with only a thump and a judder to warn the occupants of what was happening at the tyre tread. In fact, it became very surreal to be gently nudging the Discovery’s nose into three feet of icy cold water while inside the cabin, the temperature was a comfy 23 Celsius and Pink Floyd blared from the iPod. To be able to cope with terrain like this is one thing, to be able to cope and make the occupants feel cosseted is something else again.

And it 4am, things really snapped into focus. Before dinner the next day we would scale the 750-metre Myrdalsjokull glacier and drive in frenetic convoy across a black lava sand beached garnished with the photogenic wreck of a US Navy Douglas C-47, but it was that moonlit bathroom call that did it for me. To be in a place as beautifully bleak, as perishingly cold and as stunningly remote as that was incredible enough. But to look across at the Discovery corral and realise that those vehicles that had effortlessly hauled us up here would effortlessly haul us home again, well, that was just magical...