DAKARRRRRGGGGHHHHHH

The Defender Octa is about as serious as road legal off roaders get... can it stick with a full blown Dakar truck?

- OLLIE MARRIAGE

THE OCTA IS IN ITS NATURAL ENVIRONMENT. OR AT LEAST THE ONE IT was designed for. Because this ain’t Chelsea, it’s Portimão’s rally track. And this Defender is taking to it in a way no other modern SUV would dare to. It’s funny, isn’t it? Until now, no one has made an SUV specifically designed for fast off road use. Except the Americans. They get this stuff, they get that it’s fun to slap Fox shocks under an F150 and go play, but in Europe we get SUVs that attempt to mimic super saloons, or serious off roaders that are re-urbanised with V8s and 23s.

For us the Defender Octa is something new, something different. Something a bit silly. A Defender, reoriented. It’s taken a step beyond the ubiquitous G63, because it’s been given not just a twin turbo V8, but a mission, a purpose.

Go play. That about sums it up. This is not a prissy or precious car, but comes across as the kind of car that would wear battle scars proudly, were any owner bold enough to use their £145,300 investment that way. Today we are, and the Defender is storming along the routes and tracks that run up into the hillsides overlooking the circuit.

This is off roading as I love it - the fast charge, not the slow crawl - and the Octa is behaving like a 2.5-tonne rally car. It'll Scandi flick into corners, then send rocks and stones scattering at the scenery and its own reinforced undersides as the 626bhp V8 gets to work. At times it pulls over 1g of lateral load through the more banked corners. That's proper big boy grip.