‘BLAST off for Britain’s brilliant new 4x4’ was the cover headline in Autocar magazine’s 12 November 1997 issue, accompanied by a wonderful photo of an airborne Caledonian Blue five-door Freelander. The magazine compared the new baby Land Rover with Toyota’s RAV4 and the Honda CR-V and concluded that the Freelander was the best of the bunch. ‘A class act’, Autocar wrote, ‘and no one will be more aware of this right now than Toyota and Honda’. For retired Land Rover and MG Rover manager and Freelander enthusiast Ron Brown, who is now the proud owner of the car, provenance doesn’t get much better than that.
The car in the cover photo and test report is R202 BAC, a very early Freelander press launch vehicle with chassis number 600434, and Ron has owned it since June 2017. The article went on to deliver its verdict on the new vehicle: the positives were that it was built like a tank, had strong refinement, and excellent cabin design and space, and the criticisms were that it had a poor stereo and wouldn’t go up hills as well as a
