Tracks, tractors and trophies!
LAND ROVER LEGENDS
LAND Rover’s senior executives blamed it on what they described as ‘adverse business conditions’, although there were some who thought the company’s owners, BMW, had decided they didn’t want to be associated with a high-profile expedition that might fail. Others muttered darkly that it had been killed off by the company’s PR chief because he hadn’t come up with the idea. Whatever the truth, the cancellation of the Land Rover Global Expedition deprived the company of what would have been a world first and the ultimate way to celebrate its 50th anniversary in 1998. It was also the low point in Charles Whitaker’s 30-year career as a Land Rover engineer.
“I had spent almost two years on the project,” Charles says, as we flick through his extensive albums of photographs and his document archives. “Initially, I had to give up my weekends to work on it although I was eventually seconded to Marketing and Sales and from that point was working on it full-time. The expedition’s objective was to complete the first self-propelled journey around the world’s horizontal land mass.
“The expedition would start on the west coast of Ireland and traverse the UK, Europe, Russia, Alaska and North America to eastern Nova Scotia, before finishing in New York. Along the way it would cross the Irish Sea, English Channel and Bering Strait and, because it was self-propelled, it would require a boat of some sort that could be driven by the expedition’s vehicles. In total, the team would cover 18,000 miles and the expedition was expected to last a year.
“It had been attempted by both Ford and Iveco in the early 1990s but neither had succeeded, and by 1995 renowned British explorer, expedition leader, fundraiser and writer Sir Ranulph Fiennes had joined forces with Canadian adventurer Gordon Thomas and
