It was the only time I went to a garage and used a ramp. He drives a Defender 90 with a Mercedes 606 six-cylinder diesel, which is pretty powerful but I can tell you it was also a very tight fit in a Defender engine bay! Although Ali was there most of the time, I did the body lift on my own. “My best mate Ali Carter helped me a lot on the project. These days I fix ambulances for the London Ambulance Service as a night-time technician, as well as attending broken and crashed commercial vehicles.” Working on broken vehicles at the side of the road at night in the middle of winter meant it was no hardship for Mike to work on his Discovery on his driveway. He explains: “I worked in garages at first, but got bored of working within four walls, so I got a job as a roadside technician and progressed from there. Mike is a professional mechanic and commercial technician. I decided I would enjoy the car while making it able to do everything I wanted.” At around that time I started doing more off-roading and one day I just stood and looked at it and realised its potential. The first thing I did was give it a two-inch lift. I didn’t want to do anything too drastic, because I wanted it to be nice to drive on the road as well as capable off-road. I had learned from my experience with my Disco 1 and its four-inch lift and wasn’t going to make the same mistake again. Reading through all the old MoTs and workshop receipts I discovered that it’d had a new gearbox and chassis in 2009, which was good news. It was totally standard and original – it hadn’t been molested in any way – and it came with the biggest pile of paperwork you can imagine. “It was a 2003 Td5 D2 with 94,000 miles on the clock. I bought it from a friend who really didn’t want to sell it, but I hassled him every day for three weeks until eventually he agreed to sell it to me for £3000. “My next Land Rover was this Discovery 2, which I bought five years ago. I stuck another engine in, but I sold it soon afterwards because I was commuting into London and it just wasn’t practical. I’m probably the only person ever to manage to destroy a 300Tdi engine, which are famous for being indestructible. I also managed to blow two head gaskets when the engine overheated while I was driving on the road and the second time it happened it cracked the head. Trouble was, it was horrible to drive on the road. It did the trick as far as off-roading went, because it went really well through mud and water. In fact, I went a bit over the top and gave it a four-inch lift. Soon I made a few mods to make it perform better, off-road. I quickly got the bug and started going off-roading with my mates. I decided to prove him wrong and bought my first Land Rover about ten years ago. He said they were impractical and hard to fix. “My dad always loved Land Rovers, but never got round to buying one. Now that's what we call wheel articulation But how did it come about? Mike explains. It’s a darned sight more comfortable, too. It’s bristling with extras and can out-Defender your average Defender off-road. “People stop and stare when I drive by,” says Mike, from Camberley, Surrey. What isn’t typical is his Discovery 2, which is one of the most head-turning examples we’ve ever seen. He needs his Land Rover for going to work, trips to the supermarket, taking his lad to nursery and going off-roading or greenlaning at weekends. Mike, 27, is a typical family man, with a wife and young son. On upgrading it with some irresistible extras. Instead of paying way over the odds – say, £10,000 – for a tired 90 or 110 Td5 workhorse that has led a hard life down on the farm, you can buy a pampered Disco 2 for a couple of grand and then spend the leftover cash Who would ever have expected secondhand Defenders to become fashion icons, snapped up by collectors and fetching silly money, while Discoverys of the same age are languishing in the automotive world’s bargain basement? But if this is beginning to sound like a bit of a lament, forget it, because canny enthusiasts are taking advantage of this topsy-turvy situation.ĭiscovery 2s, you see, are fast becoming the new Defenders for ordinary folk who want a Land Rover that will do just about anything. Meanwhile, a Td5 Discovery 2 from the same year can be picked up for next to nothing, despite the fact it was far better appointed than a Defender with the same power unit. A Defender 90 Td5 that cost a quarter the price of a Range Rover in 2003 will now be worth four times as much as that same Range Rover. It sometimes seems like the world’s gone crazy.
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