Range Rover at 50

HOW THE SINGULAR VISION OF ONE ENGINEER SPAWNED A VEHICLE THAT WOULD DEFINE A SEGMENT FOR HALF A CENTURY

- ASH WESTERMAN

I walked green miles of jungle I walked through yellow miles of pain I crossed starvation’s desert Watched dead rivers swell with rain The song of insects filled the air Nights and days of despair where a killer’s son says “son beware”

Rollins Band, ‘Illumination’, 2000.

THE DARIEN GAP, it’s safe to say, is not up there on many people’s holiday-destination bucket list. This vast, godforsaken tract of jungle, swamp and mountains located between Panama and Colombia is most noteworthy for being the only real interruption to the circa-30,000km pan-American highway network linking Alaska to the southernmost tip of South America. It’s a stronghold of wilderness where the cloying air is thick with insects and vampire bats; the swampy ground riddled with deadly snakes; dense foliage concealing aggressive wild pigs. You’ll search in vain for a Contiki resort in the Darien.

It was the perfect place, then, back in 1972, to show the world the capabilities of the then-new Range Rover, launched just two years earlier. The Darien Gap was by far the most arduous part of an epic pan-American journey taken by two lightly modified examples, beginning in Anchorage, Alaska, and finally concluding, just over six months later, in Ushuaia, on the Tierra del Fuego archipelago in Argentina.