The Baker, the King, Range Rover, and Me

ONE OF LIFE’S BITTERSWEET things is if you live long enough, many people you love, like, and admire will predecease you. That is the way it always was and, for the time being at least, the way it must be. But such realism was cold comfort today as I sat down to write about a couple sad car-world deaths, only to read of another, which I mention first.

- Jamie Kitman

Cancer has taken Roger Becker, the Lotus chassis engineer whose brilliant career with the Norfolk maker of lightweight sports cars spanned from Elan to Evora. Roger showed great kindness to me when I was a young journalist visiting Hethel and each time I went back. As a lifelong Lotus man, I’ll miss him and every “add lightness” thing he stood for. Instead of observing a moment of silence in Becker’s honor, imagine now the sound of a Lotus twin-cam being revved for a downshift ahead of a tight bend, navigated expertly.

Pause here, too, to conjure the sound of a rumbling V-8 successfully fording a rushing stream. I am also saddened to report the death of Bill Baker, also from cancer, at the too young age of 72. Modern Land Rover’s first PR guy following its return to the U.S. market in 1986 with the Range Rover, he—along with Land Rover of North America president Charlie Hughes—is owed a debt of gratitude not just by this reporter but also by Land Rover and, if you think about it, the entire automobile industry. After all, like Jaguar Land Rover, car makers create a surprisingly large percentage of their profits today selling relatively low-volume luxury SUVs. Although a case can be made for the pioneering role of Jeep’s Wagoneer, Range Rover demonstrated most clearly the way into the upper stratospheres of cash money old and new. Baker, working for a fledgling U.S. Land Rover operation of fewer than 100 employees with a minuscule budget, was one of the grand architects.