The most surprising news at last night’s unveiling of the handsome Range Rover Evoque (watch it sell!) was the announcement that Victoria Beckham will be a ‘Range Rover design consultant’. Her precise role is unclear although, as far as I’m aware, her only previous car design experience was asking Bentley to embroider ‘David and Victoria’ on the rear seat of their Continental GT. But she certainly got the tabloid and fashion magazine cameras clicking when she positioned her size-zero frame next to the new size-zero Range Rover.
The saddest announcement – made by Land Rover MD Phil Popham – was of Spen King’s death. Most of the car journalists attending knew, of course. He died a few days ago and a few days after the 40th anniversary of his greatest work, the first Range Rover.
I have interviewed Spen many times. We had lunch last February. He was a sharp thinking, no-nonsense man who said precisely what he thought. He looked like a retired Cambridge don and had the intellect to match.
Range Rover ‘not designed to be luxurious’
He was always happy to puncture the many misconceptions surrounding the first Range Rover, and I always emerged from our meetings learning something new.
On of his clearest messages was that the Range Rover – the ‘world’s first luxury 4×4’ according to legend – was never designed to be luxurious. ‘It was actually a very basic vehicle in many ways.’ The first version – Spen’s – had vinyl seats and rubber mats. You hosed out, not vacuumed, the interior. There was no sign of leather or wood or even carpets. They came many years later. Yet it instantly appealed to both millionaires and adventurers, such was the rightness of its engineering and the genius of the concept.
Spen’s vision was to combine the on-road ability of a Rover car with the off-road agility of a Land Rover. That he over achieved in both cases was a sign of his brilliance. The modern SUV was born.
The ‘style’ was virtually an afterthought
Nor did he, and his engineering team at Rover, fuss much about the style. ‘The external styling took up about 0.001 percent of our total time,’ he told me over our recent lunch near Oxford. Like the Mini, the form followed the function. Styling chief David Bache (brilliantly) tidied up the engineering vision.
In the pantheon of British motor engineering greats, Spen sits right up there at the very top with Alec Issigonis, Land Rover creator Maurice Wilks (Spen’s uncle) and Lotus’ lightweight champion Colin Chapman.
That first Range Rover, equally, is one of the four or five greatest post-war British cars, along with Issigonis’s Mini, the E-type, the first Jaguar XJ and Wilks’ all-purpose Land Rover.