Cars for all seasons

The trials and tribulations of the cars we live with

- Charlie Magee

IN MY JOB as a freelance photographer, I'd been on the 2012 press launch of the L405 Range Rover in Morocco, where 'Mr Land Rover', Roger Crathorne, had brought over a couple of original 1970 Velar prototypes to ferry people about in between venues. Jumping in the back of a Masai Red car to get dropped back at the airport in Marrakesh is what sparked my interest in getting one: as a family, we'd been looking for a runabout for a few months and this, strangely, seemed like it could be the perfect city car.

Later, when I was working near Hamburg, I would sometimes drive back to the UK through Holland. I'd spotted this 1971 'Suffix A', as they're known to Range Rover geeks, advertised online near Arcen on the German-Dutch border. What attracted me, apart from the price, was the fact that it was right-hand-drive, having been exported from the UK about ten years before. It had also retained its original 3.5-litre Rover V8, which is not always the case back home.