Tempest Trek

IT was very tempting to call this Land Rover Legends article The Long Way Round despite the fact that Charley Boorman and Ewan McGregor snaffled the title 18 years ago, for the book and TV series about their 2004 journey from London to New York City on a couple of BMW motorcycles, pursued by a film crew and a support vehicle.

The journey that is the subject of this Legends article took place six years before that bike ride and was undeniably an expedition that took the long way round. After all, there are quicker ways of getting a couple of Land Rovers from Solihull to Paris than spending four months driving 20,054 miles over 56 days, across four continents and 27 countries.

But Tempest Trek is a more appropriate title. That is what it was known as inside Land Rover when it was being planned, because it involved the Discovery 2, known internally as Project Tempest, and obviously the drive from Solihull to Paris ‘the long way round’ was, by any stretch of the imagination, a bit of a trek. As far as I can see, it is still the longest journey ever made to an international motor show to launch a brand new vehicle. It would probably never have happened if fate hadn’t brought together two strong-willed, single-minded, can-do characters: one was Iain Chapman, and the other was the late Bill Baker.

Bill had been a successful broadcast journalist in Ohio and this led to him being hired by Ford to join its broadcast media relations team. A couple of years later he was recruited by Volvo, and then Fiat-Lancia and Ferrari, Sony and Chrysler. Bill’s talents were already well-known when Charlie Hughes, the newly-appointed CEO of Range Rover of North America, hired him to lead the PR campaign behind the 1987 launch of the Range Rover in the USA. When I talked to Charlie in 2019 while writing about this