This is my friend Matt (@grimdotdotdot) with his Special Offroad Car. Matt’s Special Offroad Car is a Tomcat — a car he made himself from a kit, a large number of astonishingly expensive bespoke parts, and his old Range Rover. Despite that, it has no doors. However it does have a 3.9 litre V8 engine, zero sound proofing, and a muffler that is best described as a “token effort”. It does around 12mpg at cruising speed, about 6 in town, and “less than 1” when offroading. It has twin winches that can flatten a standard battery in less than 60 seconds. It also has a second battery for when that happens. It has a fuck off great big steel thing called a ground anchor (used to provide a winch point when no-one is around to tow you), and it has a 20m kinetic tow rope rated for 110 tons of tension. It is, as one of the admiring onlookers at the 4x4 club said, a “bit of a weapon”. This turned out to be typical English understatement at work.
We took this weapon and used it to attack, without mercy, an offroading site in Dundry (near Bristol); Matt chauffeured myself and @rblittle (one at a time; it’s a two-seater) through foot-deep mini lakes, up 1-in-4 slopes, across… well, anything at all, and (memorably) down a bumpy 1-in-3 slope at speed without warning me first. He then let us drive it. I whooped more than I will ever admit to. Mostly, I got it stuck several times (requiring the use of the rear winch and ground anchor to pull it back out) but my one shining moment of not cocking it up was managing to climb back up that muddy 1-in-3 slope; the tactic, as explained to me by Matt, being to “point it up the hill and nail the throttle right down and then keep it pointed up the hill”. This was sufficiently loud that residents of Bristol were peering outside their houses looking for the Four Horsemen.
He warned me I would be shopping for an entry-level offroad modified 4x4 afterwards. I haven’t looked too closely at Ebay yet because I’m scared of what happens when I do.
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