2010 Range Rover Sport at home on the range

But off-roading proves a bit slippery for Kenzie

Aug 29, 2009

EDINBURGH–Trust Mother Nature to help me find a limit to the Hill Descent Control feature in Land Rover's new Range Rover Sport .

HDC was introduced many years ago. Instead of relying on engine braking to keep a vehicle's speed reined in, the system uses selective application of individual wheel brakes.

But even this doesn't always work, as we sadly proved.

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We were heading down a very slippery grass slope. We were supposed to turn right at a precise time. A Land Rover Experience instructor waved me forward, slowly, and indicated I needed to keep my wheels pointed straight ahead.

He seemed happy with our progress; me not so much, because I began to feel the front end drifting off to the right and down toward a wire fence.

I swear I hadn't moved a muscle.

Hill Descent Control was tap-tapping madly underneath, to no avail. We slid majestically (if only at about 3 km/h) into the fence.

There are always conditions that a given vehicle, especially one with road-biased tires, simply cannot handle. This was one of those.

That minor blip aside, the thresholds for the Range Rover Sport are almost insanely high.

We dropped down what looked like vertical cliffs twice as high as the car is long. Literally drove up a river. Traversed muddy slopes that would stump a mountain goat.

Yet on-road, this is a smooth-riding, calm, comfortable, and very fast touring machine.

The Sport looks like shortened version of the Range Rover but it is more closely related to the Land Rover LR4, both being body-on-frame construction while the Range Rover is unibody.

Sport is available with a naturally aspirated engine starting at $73,200, or in Supercharged form at $87,400.

The changes to the Sport for the 2010 model year follow much the same path as those for the mid-size LR4 and the big Range Rover.

Land Rover says the Sport's updated front, plus new tail lights and wheels, are all intended to emphasize its sporty yet sophisticated look, while the Rangie is heading in a more formal, elegant direction.

The Sport's new interior – seats, door trim panels, instrumentation, centre console – continues to follow the motifs of the current car.

Like LR4, the biggest change to Sport is its powertrains, again shared with its Jaguar cousins. The base model gets the same 375-hp 5.0 L V8 as the LR4, mated to the ZF six-speed automatic with paddle-shifted manual override.

But Sport offers as an option the mighty 510 horsepower supercharged version of this engine, as used in Jaguar XF-R and XK-R, and also in the full-size Range Rover.

Sport features adaptive dampers which "read" the vertical movements at each wheel 500 times a second, and change the damping stiffness according to driver inputs.

Land Rover's Terrain Response system has been expanded with a Sand setting for beach work and a Dynamic setting for a sportier on-road driving style. Firmer dampers, quicker throttle response, tighter steering, higher revs before upshifts, all contribute here.

Our test drives of the Sport models began at the Roxburghe Hotel, southeast of Edinburgh, just as Hurricane Bill was petering out.

Within minutes we were blasting down muddy country lanes, and trekking across sheep-filled fields. It looked like we'd been through a war zone.

Our first stop was at Charterhall, a World War II airport upon which had been built a race track in 1952, which operated as such until 1964.

The wet surface prevented us from definitively proving Land Rover's claim that the new Sport Supercharged can accelerate from 0-to-160 km/h and brake back to zero again in less time than the former supercharged Sport took to just get to 160 km/h.

But wow, does it accelerate: the official 0-to-100 km/h time is 6.2 seconds, 1.4 seconds quicker than the naturally aspirated version.

It also generates a tremendous, almost ominous exhaust roar when you really step into it.

A small slalom course was organized around some vertical jets of water on a skid pad. Clever. Miss a gate and instead of collecting a cone you get the underside of your car washed off.

It showed how nimble this massive (2,638—2,677 kg, depending on which options you order) vehicle can be in the tight and twisty stuff.

Knowing you have to scrub speed off with this much road-hugging weight, you will be comforted to know that the gigantic brakes were engineered in conjunction with Italian race brake specialist Brembo.

Frankly, unless you have a desperate need to have the fastest SUV on your block, forgo the supercharged version, settle for a tick or two slower acceleration in return for better fuel economy – and save $14,200, enough to buy a pretty nice small car.

Especially if you are going to do any serious off-roading, because that duty almost penalizes excess power. You want tires to maintain contact with whatever surface you may encounter, not spin wildly and lose all control.

–Jim Kenzie

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