Thread: Solihull, Gaydon & Eastnor - a LR nerdfest

So, in the 5 days before I left the UK I did a bit of a LR nerdfest tour with my car, taking a few photos of it back in 'familiar' LR surroundings before it leaves for good kinda thing. I'd also wanted to do the Solihull factory tour for a while and managed to cram in a few hours there 2 days before I left. Best of all, a member of the G4 club works for JLR at the Gaydon facility, he managed to get me in there for a couple of hours for a tour round after I'd finished at Solihull.

Eastnor was to meet up with camel_landy of this parish for some handy hints & tips on bringing my car out here to Oz, as well as to just chew the fat as we hadn't met up for a few months ! Mark was working though, so we had about half an hour during the lunchtime break. Luckily, the weather was stunning so we stood outside, whilst various other LR Experience chaps wandered past commenting that my RRS shouldn't really be as shiny as it currently is !! Anyway, once he'd headed off on his afternoon D4 demo drive I got permission to put the car into a few places outside the office for some photos.

Solihull, well, you can't take photos of the production line but suffice to say, if anyone ends up in the UK on holiday, book the tour. I should've listened more at school, done mechanical engineering at Uni and gone working there. Taken between buildings in a new TDV8 FFRR and then out onto the factory offroad circuit, brilliant. That 4.4 TDV8 really is something else, hugely impressive piece of kit. Amusingly as I drove into the car park a couple of the experience chaps came over to chat about the car & a group of American tourists came up to have a look at it before they headed off for the full day tour. "WOW, you actually drive this everyday??" WOWWW. Americans, don't ya just love them.

Gaydon is just a surprise and it's *huge*, really beyond anything I'd expected from going to the Heritage Museum next door. I know it sounds like a stupid thing to say but, I've never seen such a huge area of car parks with so many JLR products parked up. Everyone must get them as company cars or something Ian Callum's XKR was sat in his parking space, surrounded by loads of other XK's, mostly the new R versions either in blue or white, along with shedloads of Rangies & Sports. Evoques by the dozen parked up outside the press preparation area and trundling round the place, must've been some kind of dealer day on for them as literally 10's of them were coming in & out of the facility with 4 people in each. The test mule Evoques were parked up in various states of disrepair, apparently they're all coming back in from round the world now to be scrapped. Saw 2 full size mule Range Rovers, 1 heading out onto the road, the other onto the test track. There was also 'something' with a loud V8 getting an absolute pasting round the test track, the noise was stunning Also saw several of the Range-e's parked up, the electric hybrids. 1 was just leaving as I drove into Gaydon, fair to say the driver wasn't hanging around judging by the way the backend of it was squatting on the floor. Again, sadly no photos from inside Gaydon as I'd likely have got my contact there shot for treason, but it's a brilliant place.

Anyway, a few photos of my trip and BV55 YZE's 'farewell tour' so to speak. The grainy ones are from my cameraphone, someone's wife packed the digital camera into a box that's currently on the high seas heading for Australia, so apologies for the quality.

My flickr set of all my photos of the car is here, scroll toward the bottom for the Eastnor & Gaydon photos
G4 Range Rover Sport - a set on Flickr

Solihull











Eastnor









Camel_landy's winch equipped D4 is in the background below



Anyone fancy a green Defender ? Pile of them parked up here



Or a 6 wheeler ?



Eastnor main building



So, a fair number of miles covered and a fly cemetary created on the front of the car but it was worth it. Now, I just want to get the car over here so I can start on the next round of adventures

And there was me thinking the Army had been abusing them

Jon, I'm in Melbourne. Will probably find myself up in Sydney occasionally once I find a job. All help & advice welcome though, it's proving to be an 'interesting' experience so far, to say the least....

Adam, it was a chap called Malcolm, a retired design engineer from Solihull. Great bloke, very interesting to talk to and obviously, fiercely defensive of the brand. But then we did have a good natter about how much you either love or hate them with the, erm, reliability