Features

When I wrote to Jimmy Savile at the age of seven to see if he could Fix It for me to have a go in a long-wheelbase Land Rover, the miserable sod never bothered. Every week, he sent other kids off to meet the Pope, climb Mount Everest, dance with Legs and Co. and fly spaceships.

For crying out loud, I even lived just down the road from the Land Rover factory. So it couldn't have been easier for Jimmy to Fix It for me. He could have Fixed that one in his lunch break. But no, nothing.

Jim'll Fix It for me? Ha, well I'll Fxxk it for him, I decided - my language was, perhaps, a little strong for a seven-year-old, but the sentiment entirely forgiveable, I'm sure.

The point was, as a lad growing up in suburban Solihull, I craved the wilderness, the wide open spaces and what was, to me anyway, the glamour of machines that could carry you beyond the sprawl of Birmingham and into the desert, the jungles and the mountains that lay, I was sure, just beyond it.

Not one to harbour a grudge, I spent the next 30 years or so brooding about this oversight on the part of Sir Jimmy Savile and decided that the only way to overcome this childhood wound was to Fix It for myself. So I have. And this is it. In fact, it's taken eight years to fix. I seem to have got a little carried away with the business of turning this Land Rover into the one I dreamed of having a go in when I was seven.

I shan't give you the full list of what I've done to it, because you would saw your own legs off out of boredom. So here's the seriously edited version:

The engine is a 4.5-litre V8, hand-built by legendary Land Rover and V8 specialists, JE Engineering. It's been balanced and gas-flowed, has a custom crankshaft, camshaft and induction pipes and is set up for maximum torque right across the rev range.

A full-length, stainless steel exhaust system remains, but via a lever mounted in the cabin, diverters can be operated to send the exhaust gases direct from the headers out through the custom-built stainless steel sidepipes with no silencers to get in the way.

Elsewhere, it's had a four-inch suspension lift, with dislocation cones for maximum axle articulation off-road, matching radius arms and all-new bushes. (Stay with me; this is important.) Front brakes are now vented grooved discs, the rear axle is taken from a Discovery to allow rear discs too, in order to cope with the extra power.

The bespoke, chassis-mounted internal roll cage was made from cold-drawn seamless tubing by Qt Services, the people who now build the Bowler Wildcat frame. It will be here when the world has come to an end and we are all dust.

Inside, it has new seats front and back and a custom-built speaker cabinet housing three sub-woofers with six further speakers dotted about the cabin powered by three amps. It is very, very loud and, if turned up to full volume, can cause you to go to the lavatory.

There are DVD screens in the back, and the rear view mirror also acts as a DVD screen and as a monitor for the reversing camera. The stereo runs off a separate electrical circuit and battery which also powers the under-car fluorescent UV lights.