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page last updated: 09 September 2007 |
"Open Top" Renegade Jeep |
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must have been about this time - mid 80s - that I got to drive one of
these. It was in the early days of BBC's Top Gear and one of the
presenters, Steve Berry, lived in - oddly enough, Bury in Lancashire.
His wife, whose name I can't recall worked in Dorothy Perkins (women's
fashion store) in the town and at the time I was her boss, the Area
Manager. She was helping out with a store opening in a nearby town and
turned up in a Jeep like this, lent to her husband as a motoring
journalist, and she let me have a go in it. They are very small and very scary. You seem to sit between the rear wheels with an incredibly long steering column. The chassis owes a lot to the wartime Jeep, a set-up I am familiar with as Land Rover used it right up until the Defender came out and even then only modified it. With an underpowered four cylinder motor like my Series 2 Land Rover has it works brilliantly. Put a 4 litre straight six in there and keep the leaf springs and 1940s brakes and steering and you have an entertaining ride to say the least. My view is they are unsafe. I had an old shape Cherokee once for a week while my Discovery was being converted to LPG and it was the same, same technology underneath no doubt, but they are all stupidly fast and very hard to control. There is probably some sort of Darwinism going on - you learn very quickly how to drive them, or you die. |
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