The Land Rover testing saga continues, with the Defender now taking on the Nordschleife
When even a murky picture of a Defender interior can generate pages and pages of comments, images of the car lapping the Nurburgring should fill the forum to bursting point. Prepare your best responses…
There are so many question – why probably being the main one. The closest an old Defender will have got to a lap of the ‘ring would have been pulling a car from the gravel at Aremberg, so to see the new car there deliberately doing a lap is something of a surprise. Or is it? The Defender’s road manners will have to be improved this time around, and arguably there isn’t a much better place to sign off dynamic behaviour in extremis than the Nordschleife. Naturally the road routes in the UK will be a priority for testing, but road cars are tested on this circuit so frequently for a reason – because so much challenge is packed into such a relatively short amount of distance and time.
Further interest comes from working out just what this Defender is. Previous development mules have sported smaller wheels (including one on the rear), which this one has ditched in favour of lower profile tyres and bigger rims. Note too a new exhaust arrangement; before two pipes have been paired to the side, whereas now they exit separately. Could this be a sportier petrol model, where those we’ve already seen have been diesel? It’ll be a shock to the die-hard fans to see a Defender with any kind of focus beyond scaling every mountain and fording every stream, but there can be no denying the demands of modern customers.
Otherwise, it’s the silhouette that’s become familiar over the past few months, boxy and blocky in the best Defender tradition. While there’s still plenty of cladding to disguise the true Defender details underneath, it would seem the basic proportions are nailed on – the overhangs are short, the wheels pushed right out to the corners, and the curves that have come to characterise recent Land Rover design conspicuous by their absence. Furthermore, while it’s not exactly at home on the track, heaving about on its springs quite markedly, there’s no doubting it’ll be a heck of a lot more composed (and faster) than any previous Defender you care to mention.
So that’s the latest in the new Defender story: it has been around the Nordschleife at least once. With it still believed to be a 2020 car, expect more surprises to follow – a run at Santa Pod, perhaps – over the next few months. It’s getting closer!
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