Before the beginning

This rare Amazon Green pre-production Range Rover is Velar chassis number 4. James Elliott charts its historically revealing factory restoration

- James Elliott

Every cloud has a silver lining. Imagine signing up to JLR Classic's Reborn programme and then suffering the disappointment of being told that your vehicle wasn't going to happen thanks to the programme winding down during Covid. Then, before you have finished crying over your spilt tilt, they instead offer you a historically important Range Rover Velar, chassis number four no less. JLR already had the car and would restore it to asnew condition, no easy task with these pre-production prototypes on which everything is slightly different. Oh, and the car you were getting also had an experimental V8 in it.

This is Octane, so you don't need to be told which Velar we are not talking about, but you might need to know which Velar we are talking about. In the company records, early Range Rover history is hand-written but detailed and has the advantage of Mr Land Rover, Roger Crathorne, still being around to unravel it. There is even an excellent book on the first 50 vehicles, by him, Geof Miller (who also worked on the original project), Gary Pusey and James Taylor, published by Brooklands Books.

The Range Rover, aimed at an American market it would then not enter for decades, was devised by Spen King and Gordon Bashford as a softer, leisure Land Rover and was developed from 1966 to 1970. Those in the know will tell you that the Velars comprise the seven full prototypes - of which two still exist - plus the pre-production cars and that they were allegedly christened as much as a near-portmanteau of Alvis and Rover as the word's coincidentally plausible meanings in both Spanish ('vigil') and Italian ('cover').