WORTH THE WAIT

Getting baptised into 4x4 culture in the Thar Desert in a Mahindra Thar. This wasn’t a dream!

- Saurabh Gamare

It was the last day of the Mahindra Royal Escape and I was strolling in the Pratap Niwas palace’s open courtyard trying to kill time before boarding my flight to Mumbai. That’s when I heard a thunderous roar from a fighter jet splitting the sky open, and executing a perfect gravity-defying vertical Charlie. This manoeuvre is always the showstopper at the Republic Day parade. From witnessing this spectacle to driving the all-new Mahindra Thar wherever possible, this trip had many firsts for me.

This was the all-new Mahindra Thar’s first official media drive, also my first drive for Motoring. We started from Udaipur at 0900 and I was assigned a hardtop Thar in red that ran on the new 2.2-litre diesel mHawk which produces 130 bhp and 32.63 kgm, paired to a 6-speed manual ’box. As much as I wanted a petrol automatic one, I never got enough of this torquey diesel mill. Our nine-car convoy was led by the exclusive Mahindra Legend and there were a couple of Scorpios that acted as the advance and sweep vehicles driven by extremely skilled drivers. Driving in convoys can be boring for some, but I loved every bit of it. Throughout the drive, the Mahindra Adventure team on the walkie-talkies shared more knowledge than we could have asked for, be it about the old Mahindras or Rajasthan’s culture. Credit to them for making the long journey engaging.