Range Rover Sport – One of the world’s most expensive production cars (“from £62,000”) has tackled one of the world’s iconic ski descents – and made it down intact – just not as quickly as a skier.
Land Rover put one of their Range Rover Sports, which they describe as, “The most agile and dynamic Land Rover,” down the route of the famous Inferno downhill course in Mürren in the beautiful Swiss Jungfrau region.
Like many other great annual ski races, the Inferno is not so much a ski piste as a race route across several pistes, it descends 2,170 vertical metres and each year nearly 2,000 people race down on one Saturday in January.
First staged in 1928 when the winning skier took more than an hour to compete the descent, this winter will see the 74th staging of the race on 21st January 2017. 1850 competitors, setting off every 12 seconds and mostly amateur, will take part on the 15.8km long course. The winner is likely to complete the run in less than 15 minutes.
The Range Rover Sport Land rover sent down was driven by ‘ex-Stig’ Ben Collins, a professional driver. Who took 21 minutes, 36 seconds to complete the course – not bad but not really up there with the fastest skiers either.
“This success is impressive on two levels. First, because Range Rover Sport, as the names suggests, is a Sporty model designed mainly for high-performance driving on tarmac. Second, Ben Collins is mainly a track racer with limited off-road skills and experience,” a Land Rover spokesperson said.
In completing the challenge the Sport hit speeds of up to 96 mph (so faster than skiers) and tackled up to 75 percent gradients.
The company says that the car’s ‘Land Rover Terrain Response’ technology helped “get it out of trouble” as it descended over snow, ice, loose rock, mud, broken asphalt, grass and gravel along the way.
“This was genuinely one of the hardest tests I’ve faced in my driving career. The route was insane and certainly the toughest course I’ve ever completed. It challenged you with every kind of obstacle this side of molten lava and as conditions go, it was about as bad as it gets – torrential weather mixed with cliffs, trees, all kinds of stuff you don’t really want to crash into,” said Collins, who added, “There could only be one winner in the challenge – the mountain or the car. The key to the run was precision: being able to maintain speed and carry that speed down the hill in the way the skiers can do, carving through the turns. The Range Rover Sport gave me so much help. I had to use the Terrain Response because the grass was like an ice rink and it really got me out of trouble. I believed in the car and it meant we could shed a lot of time over the runs. To be honest I abused it and it just kept on going – I couldn’t have asked for a better machine to do the job.”
