Escape Velocity: The Land Rover Series 3
There is an old saying that goes something along the lines of “you can’t consider yourself a true car enthusiast until you’ve owned an Alfa Romeo.” It’s a well worn chestnut, but I have my own version, which goes more like: “You can’t consider yourself a true car enthusiast unless you love, deeply love, at least a couple terrifically slow vehicles.”
As analog vehicle lovers, of course we love speed and vehicle dynamics. The road is the destination. We love matching revs and testing the limits of adhesion and screaming along in a tunnel of velocity and sonorous, spine-tingling speed. But crikey, there is something truly profound about slow vehicles which are comprehensively involving to drive and force you to operate them. Vehicles which can do important things, but not without your direct and focused involvement. Vehicles which not only invite you to drive, but which demand it, dammit.
The Series Land Rover is exactly this kind of vehicle.
What is it about the Land Rover Series 3 that we all love so much? What is it about these (frankly absurd) things that fills us with such overwhelming emotion and causes us to inevitably picture ourselves behind the wheel, bouncing and bombing across some exotic savannah, desert, forest or beach? No one, apparently, is immune to the charms of a proper Series 3.
But why, exactly?
Are they the best driving Land Rovers ever made? No and, uhh… hell no. They’re a little loud, a little bouncy, a little unrefined, and a lot slow. The steering is heavy at slow speeds and vague at higher ones, the drum brakes feel decidedly wooden, and the seat adjustment is confined to how much you can personally wiggle your ass forward or backward on the cushion. The gear lever moves half a meter between cogs, there are no roll up windows, and unless you’ve ever driven one you’d be excused for focusing on those things. If you have driven one, however, you wouldn’t think of mentioning them because once you’ve been behind the wheel you can’t help but understand. You can’t help but get it. There are some cars that everyone just gets, intuitively. Everyone of all ages. One of them is the AC Cobra. That’s a car people just understand the second they see it. You don’t have to be a car enthusiast, and it doesn’t matter what gender you are, what age you are, you can’t help but understand the appeal of the Cobra. Intuitively. You get it. You may not want one, necessarily, but the Cobra is a car you get.
The Series Land Rover is another.
People get it. The shape oozes adventure and exotic locales from every rivet. The grille and front end holler stiff upper lip Britishisms into the wind and the shape, as it moves past you, is all plucky, bulldog toughness and cheerful stick-to-it-iveness. And man, when you get behind the wheel, you just want to go somewhere. Somewhere weird! Somewhere wild! Somewhere you’ve never been before! Casablanca, maybe. The Atacama Desert! Nom Pen! The Amazon! And frankly, why not?! A Series 3 has been to those places before and a Series 3 will go to those places again, and any others you can think of, so why shouldn’t it be with you behind the wheel?
But whenever I’m driving around in my Series 3 88 and I stop to chat with people, one question comes up time and again, usually with a lot of trepidation, as if the asker is frightened of what the answer will be. “What’s the top speed?”
So let’s get to that. Get it out of the way. In the interests of science let’s put it on record.
What’s the top speed of a Series 3? I have no earthly idea, and neither do you, but far more importantly I couldn’t care less and neither should you. Bluntly, the top speed of a Series Land Rover is exactly as fast as you want to drive it, and not a single mile per hour faster, and it will happily bounce along at that speed all day long, every day, and take you anywhere you want to go.
Is that a cop out? No. Hear me out. Top speed, and indeed all performance metrics, are only relevant to the extent they affect how you use a vehicle. What you do with it. Will the top speed of an old Series III do that?
No, it won’t. Not unless you let it.
I have personally driven Series Land Rovers across the rather expansive country of Spain, from Santiago de Compostela to Sevilla, from Caceres to Cartagena, and from Jaen to Javea. On road and off, over remote mountain ranges so dense with trees the sunlight couldn’t peek through and across arid landscape that looked like a scene from a Roadrunner cartoon. Through epic olive groves that stretch for hours, along wide expanses of pristine beach, and through walled, medieval pueblos with streets barely wider than the front fenders. I have loaded them onto ferries and explored the Balearic Islands, filled them with surfboards and taken my kids to remote breaks that only the locals know about, and even, that’s right, bombed along modern superhighways in them. And you know what? I don’t think in that entire time I ever knew, accurately, how fast I was going or gave enough of a hoot to try to find out.
Other drivers overtook me, sure. But with a friendly toot of the horn and a wave, never an angry blast and a shaking fist. I chose different routes than I might have chosen in another vehicle, sure. But never routes that didn’t provide new sights and sounds than I would have experienced in any other vehicle, either. I never turned on the climate control and popped a playlist into the sound system in all those journeys (mostly because a Series Land Rover has neither) but I also never missed a single moment of what was happening, what I was driving through, or what I was experiencing. Because traveling by Series Land Rover is a very special thing. It’s like traveling by MGA or vintage Lambretta or Tiger Moth. And by that I mean it’s an incomparably joyous thing that should never for even a millisecond be sullied by pedestrian concerns about top speeds, ETA’s, or fuel efficiency. Doing so is an insult. A slap in the face to the gods that govern these rare moments of escape, slotted in as they invariably are between business meetings and paperwork and grocery shopping and the endless mowing of endless lawns.
So if I can offer any advice in these early days of the new year, let it be this: Get yourself a Series Land Rover, or an equally involving, absurd, ridiculous old vehicle, and get out there. Maybe a Citroën 2CV or a Puch Maxi or a Steyr Haflinger or a TR3. Bounce around and laugh yourself silly. Trust me, it’ll change you.
Don’t worry about how fast it goes, because if it’s the right vehicle it goes exactly fast enough to escape.