Military Spec Land Rover S3

feels bulletproof it really is I mean we took it on those trails in Moab you know with all the super built new Rubicon Jeeps and all that right and this thing hung with all of them oh I got some dirt here we go let's give it a shot okay through the puddle watch that be 20 feet deep all right this is the way these things really come into the wrong this is what it was made for this is what it was made for that's right exactly but we are flat out 55 miles an hour unless she'll give you welcome to episode with Jay Leno's Garage this is part of what I call my street grab series I see something cool I stopped the guy I invite him to come to the garage now this gentleman's been here before always here about three four years ago the 959 Porsche as you see he has very eclectic taste this uh appears to be a 1972 Land Rover we'll find out exactly what it is I understand it's a military vehicle uh the gentleman's name who owns this is Alex grappo Alex come on in buddy good to see you again thanks for the coffee good to see you too he has a great coffee company out of Denver right that's correct yeah and he sent us a bunch of coffee last time it was great well this is a big switch from the 959 a little bit it's a little bit different have you always been an off-road guy I actually do and in fact I grew up overseas in fact in a country where this particular vehicle has some interesting history and so I've always just been attracted to the romance of vintage Land Rovers as well as the capability in the history that's there and what country was that not to mentioned that was actually in the sultanate of Oman oh okay okay oh fascinating all right so this looks like a well-used vehicle I guess it is this actually had some military application correct yeah that is correct and you know I I often say like if this car could talk the stories that it would tell you know one of the things that's tricky about some of these old Land Rovers is it can be a little bit hard to trace down the exact history because they produce so many in multiple variants that a lot of what we know about this car has come down to research and our best guess so today some of the things will come out as what we assume to be the closest thing we can find to the truth based on the history we've been able to research okay and if it could speak it would be a language we don't understand so that really wouldn't help us much yeah and I think what language is that so uh language they speak in Oman is uh is Arabic exactly yeah um this particular car um actually we believe its history was primarily in Germany there is some evidence that these uh what are known as xmod Land Rovers or xmod meaning ex-ministry of Defense okay um were stationed actually along the Berlin Wall oh and so we've seen some photographic evidence of these Land Rover Series threes in the 109 inch wheelbase that were stationed along the Berlin Wall hopefully on our side yes on the right side on the right side of the wall yeah it won't be on the other side of the wall correct that'd be bad well very cool now environment are these six cylinder yeah so this car features the 2.6 liter straight six engine okay um the 88 inch wheelbase which is the shorter model were generally fitted with the four-cylinder engines and in fact it was really interesting prior to the series three uh Land Rover in fact test it a little bit with the with actually a Rolls-Royce four-cylinder engine okay but they found that it was too heavy and they eventually went a different direction well I've got a ferret tank over there in the corner that has the Rolls-Royce or Daimler uh six cylinder engine and is that a diesel no it's a gas gas is this diesel again this is petrol okay okay now would this have had a machine gun or something mounted on it was it strictly just for patrol so it's funny you should ask you know um that's one of the things we've tried really hard to discover about this car is what its exact purpose was and so one of the things that we are fairly confident in is that this is what was called an ffr model meaning that it was fitted for radio so in fact this is what we see right here with this box over here this was actually designed to mount high powered Communications equipment here into this so that it could communicate with you know other vehicles and and people people right whatever its mission was but back to your question about did this have machine guns one of the cool things about it is it actually still has the original gun rack behind the seats so you can still see that there in fact with I believe to be leather mounts however where this car gets really interesting is there is actually a version of this technically it was uh they started doing them on the series 2 in the series 2A but they were known as the Pink Panthers and it was a pink version of this car and the reason they painted it pink was because it Blended in with the desert those cars were typically mounted with between three and four machine guns on them usually two thirty caliber and 250 caliber and those were specifically created for the SAS on missions in the desert so Yemen Oman UAE and I believe even in Jordan and I've heard some rumors of maybe Egypt but given the nature of the SAS we'll never really know everywhere or and the fact is they're pink that's not really going to threaten it well oh it's a pain that should be okay and then take them by surprises well and the crazy thing is at first they they thought the idea was wild why are we painting these vehicles pink and it was they accidentally discovered this while they were doing some other mission where I believe there was an aircraft that was painted pink and when they were trying to find it in the desert from another aircraft they couldn't spot it and so they realized the pink actually camouflaged perfectly into the sand especially in differing light conditions which is why the vehicles are painted pink and in fact they've become some of the most collectible Land Rovers to this day just given the uh really interesting history behind it now is it possible open this hood without taking the tire off yeah absolutely let's see what we got here all right looks all original now what's all the rust was this in a salty climate or so technically this actually isn't rust this vehicle is uh continues to be well used to this day um and in fact we just had it um in Moab Utah oh this is dust isn't it so this is red dust from Moab Utah the car just completed the uh the white rim trail uh in Canyonlands and so a lot of driving on the Red Dirt Roads pushed a lot of dust into the the engine bay and what kind of horsepower are we talking here about a hundred and a quarter or something like that yeah that's a little optimistic you know to be honest this car is uh I think the factory horsepower that they quoted was 70. oh um with about 120 pound-feet of torque that feels optimistic most days I think one of the hardest things about driving this car is that it is in fact extremely slow however more speed or five speed four speed and that's actually one of the interesting distinctions between the series 2 and the series 3 which this is is that they moved for the first time to a Synchro mesh gearbox when they moved to the series 3 Land Rovers and what that was in the 70s they didn't get synchromational 70s well that's funny well and keep in mind Land Rover you know was sort of born out of the inspiration of the Willy's Jeep they wanted to take that military off-road technology and bring it to the average citizen so this was you know when the Land Rover Series first came out it was designed to be really a farm car almost like a replacement for a tractor in many cases so the one thing I'll say on this is that what it lacks in power and torque it more than makes up for in gearing and so the low range on this we found to be absolutely Unstoppable and actually quite impressive so top speed is what about 55 something like that yeah I've hit about 70 going downhill and it's about it's about that time you begin fearing for your life yeah yeah so I'd say it's comfortable at 50 you generally don't want to go much faster is it all-wheel drive all the time or can you go it is not it's actually got a shifting mechanism inside that will shift it between four-wheel drive and two-wheel drive as well as low and high range okay it also for its four wheel drive system actually features a center differential that still to this day works awesome I've off-roaded a lot of modern cars with electronic front and rear locking differentials and whatnot and this thing with its uh you know old Technology Center differential does fantastic can it be front wheel drive also is it just rear wheel drive you know I'm not entirely sure of the torque split of what it's able to do I will say I've been in situations off-roading in fact we're just in Moab we did fins and things over there with no issues whatsoever and there were several situations where only the front or only the back tires had traction and it seemed to figure it out in fact I was to be honest in a bit of disbelief of how well it did do and as drum breaks probably originally it was drum brakes that was one of the life safety upgrades that we made to it is it does have disc brakes on it now all floors are just the front all four disc brakes and they work really well it's a fantastic upgrade especially for this car where I put slightly larger tires than the original spec on it well I like the patina let's uh let's close this up and take a look at the rest of the vehicle thank you now something I noticed the interior is interesting got three seats in the front now I've got a 1941 American La France fire truck same sort of setup but on the gear shift third and fourth are switched because when you're from before the guy in the middle is going to just be let's say really uncomfortable so the idea was you go a third down here and then fourth all the way up so it's out of the way but this is just a standard H pattern correct yeah and in fact the best strategy we suggest for whoever is sitting in the middle is to sit cross-legged yeah yeah yeah okay is this wider than a normal vehicle or is it just the illusion because it's three seats you know what's interesting is it's actually much narrower yeah so the car feels very narrow and it's one of the reasons that it does very well off-road is and especially where we spend a lot of our time in the mountains of Montana Wyoming and Colorado it does really well on those Trails because it is so narrow so I think it's part of the illusion and you can kind of see it when you're following behind it on a main road just how narrow the vehicle is oh interesting does this windshield fall down or no it does and in fact that's one of the indicators for this particular vehicle that's helped give us some clues about its history is that not only the fact that it has the ffr components which is fitted for radio like the Box we talked about up front but the fact that it was a soft top and has a folding windshield suggests that generally it was designed to be able to be easily transported by air typically helicopter and so yes the windshield does fold down and usually they do that to fit into lower transport environments obviously the top has been down on this all the time because the dash has just bleached out to death isn't it it's pretty much sun damage we like to call that patina patina exactly exactly what do these two here do so the two levers on the side over here this is what actually controls your airflow so your heating and your venting and it's a fairly basic system where you're either hot or your atmospheric air and it's either coming through the bottom vent or event up top typically to serve a defrost function and imagine those tube tires they are not and these are actually modern BF Goodrich Mud terrain tires oh okay but they suit the car very well yeah they do and they look like they they look like they're the original tires yeah again we I I prefer to keep this vehicle in a state where it's proudly showing its age and history right right so we like to keep everything uh 51 years old yeah yeah correct and you know once you're driving it it still drives fantastic the thing I find so odd is that the gas tank is under the sea you gotta take the seat out to fill it with gas that is correct it's an interesting process and it's also exciting for the passenger to know that they're sitting on a bomb yeah exactly um and and that's another sort of interesting feature of the car is that are actually built and this one has it as well the second fuel tank is not functioning at the moment but they were built with two fuel tanks one under the driver's side one under the passenger side and what's interesting is on the Pink Panther ones that I was telling you about earlier those are actually fitted to hold over 100 gallons of fuel on board so in fact when you see the Jerry cans on those models those are actually typically filled with water for the occupants since they were designed to really serve several months out in the desert in covert operations so fuel was all internally stored and then the Jerry cans were typically water now can you switch from one tank to the on the is there a switch on the dash there's a switch actually I believe it's under the middle seat over here which electric or is it a actually it's a manual yeah manual actors electrics can go out and that could be correct and you know you bring up a really good point about this car which is that you really don't have to be enormously mechanically in fine to fix things on this car or know what's going wrong in several cases you know we've run into issues with the car and we can just look in and you know trace the problems back and you can kind of figure it out on the spot and it's meant to be fixed on the fly as you say correct and again you know Land Rover gets a bad reputation some of their early 2000s and 90s cars certainly didn't help with that but really these back in the day and still this one to this day I mean this is the most reliable vehicle these are the most rugged these are the incredibly robust in rugged vehicle and it just starts up every time whether it's minus 10 degrees outside or 100 in the summer this car drove through the two highest mountain roads in the in North America on pavement to almost 13 000 feet zero issues didn't blink and I'm surprised it has a key ignition I would have thought being a military vehicle is just two switches under the dash and that's again one of the changes of the series three is in the series three they switch from a push button ignition to a keyed ignition on the series three and by the way you commented on the dash that was one of their more sophisticated upgrades that they like to Market was that this had a very civilized Dash right as opposed to the series two which was a metal Dash right right okay well very cool can we take it for a spin yeah I'd love to go out for a drive let's give them a shot and see how she goes foreign just pretty much standard yeah first Gears uh all the way over is reverse so it's kind of right in the middle and then push up that's probably reverse right there if it doesn't have a reverse lockout on here no power steering in this baby power steering you get a workout oh there it is way over there a lot of movement in that shifter I know that's it's like you're trying on butter yep feels bulletproof it really is I mean we took it on those trails in Moab you know with all the super built new Rubicon Jeeps and all that this thing hung with all of them and you know it doesn't have much power and it's not fast but it's relatively responsive yeah no no you can't be an old school the nice thing about it too is that you know you really get to work the gears in this car to get the power out of the engine so you're always shifting in this car which is kind of fun you know modern cars are so uh they have so much power that there's a reasonable old school stuff you know like we're in the Blackbird you know that spy plane I'm looking at the gauges and I noticed I said oh I know it's your oil pressure gauge you actually have a tube a copper tube with oil to the game the guy said yeah that's because it doesn't break it's not electronic you know I was talking about this a friend of mine the other day he got what he's electric toilets you know those ones yeah does all the sprays he said I love it until the power went out in my house and I realized I can't flush the toilet now for three days you know because it's electric it was screwed it's a great line of Sherlock Holmes book where Sherlock Holmes calls electricity The High Priestess of false security exactly you that is a really great saying I'm gonna steal that always remember I lived in San Francisco years ago when I was just starting out and we had the power go out and it lasted over a day yeah and I think I remember hearing you're three days away from complete chaos power goes out I think the power is adequate I mean it's like you say it's not fast but it's not slow you're just using all the pedal travel all the time yeah and the one thing that's nice too is the clutch is very light forgiving yes so I like teaching people how to drive in this car because it's such a forgiving clutch like the engine can get in such low RPMs before it stalls right plenty of torque so very forgiving and the one thing I'll say too in in low range I mean it just feels like there's nothing it can't crawl over right right it's so torquey I mean first is where third would normally be yeah and you go over that way and it used to have a reverse lockout spring so you could kind of tell yeah but at some point it snapped and you know it makes it a little bit harder to find the gears does it have a horn it does it's on the stock oh there you go got your LiftMaster you know Steve McQueen used to have a Land Rover Series too that he used to drive around La all right well I knew Steve really yeah yeah I didn't know I never I don't see the Land Rover in fact he was quoted as saying that one of his favorite things to do was to load up the series on a weekend with the dogs and his kids and head out to the desert well he was a big biker too so I knew him more for the motorcycles Marilyn Monroe used to have a series as well I was all right she did and I think for me that's just one of the coolest things about the car is it's this was everything that I think William Holden might have had one of these Queen of England was very famous for having several Land Rover Series and she drove a tank to the Queen of England that's true and she was a big Range Rover fan as well there wasn't a whole lot she didn't drive and she used to like to drive herself as well and she stayed in Buckingham Palace you know everybody else ran away but she didn't she is quite a woman during the war stayed in the mountain another cool thing about this car is there's just something about looking over a tire on the hood that even if you're in L.A it makes you feel like you're on Safari right and you know and the sill is way down here which is what I like Monica is still is up here you know yep well and of course a lot of the car was the body was made out of aluminum back in the day which was quite sophisticated for that time and again one of the things you'll notice too is that this car you know you know because of the military setup it was designed to carry lots of people in very heavy equipment right and so as a result this car rides extraordinarily stiff yeah until it's very underweight or it's under load so it does ride a little bit stiff but it was designed that way for a functional purpose but we are flat out about 55 miles an hour you'll also notice something interesting on here which is that there is no tachometer I saw that so it's the car is mostly driven by feel the third thing that's kind of an interesting Quirk of the car is that even though this thing was designed for the furthest thing from performance yeah it's actually quite easy to position your tire exactly where you want it when you're trying to go around the corner or whatnot now is this a car or a truck it's actually a great question and technically I believe they used to refer to it as a wagon but technically today I think it'd be considered a truck now the gear between third and fourth you really could I mean gears are the one thing that this motor has that really needs for it to work properly you put a brick on the gas bottle and take your foot off and you're fine pretty much and once you get used to a gear shift pattern it's fine yeah and again I love the clutch on this thing it's very light but especially too when you're in low range and you're off-roading yeah that light clutch but it's still very grabby so it's very easy to off-road with it get over obstacles and whatnot and again surprisingly it was very good at technical off-roading which I really didn't expect given that you know this car wasn't designed for that it was designed for off-roading down dirt roads and muddy roads and up you know Hills and whatnot military but once it got to Moab it was very good on the technical stuff it's fun to drive I mean you can't get anything this open anymore that's what I was gonna say it's just you know and today is the perfect day for it I know a nice sunny day and you know it's really a nice convertible and the nice thing about it too is that a lot of really nice cars they're so high stress yeah we talked about that with the 959 it's almost hard to drive that because you know if anything happens there's no spare parts right and this car it's so low stress that it's it makes it even more fun to drive especially if you're going down to the beach or you're going camping or something like that you can get into it with dirty shoes you can get into it with a bunch of dirty kids it doesn't matter apologies don't have to wash it exactly and again you know as you commented before sure a lot of this stuff is old and worn but it still works great so there's not really a need and the nicer it gets the more you have to worry about it yeah and it's funny too you know of all the different new sports cars and Hyper cars you can drive this car still probably attracts the most attention you know like on the website we'll do a Lamborghini or something and you get 600 000 hits 800 000 hits you do a tricked out B210 Datsun 1.9 million you know what most people know well the other thing that's cool too right is that this car has cult following and for good reason right it's the history everything the car represents a lot of people want to talk to you about it they want to ask questions they want to know the story behind the car and again the thing is that this car's got a story Dr Livingston I presume vibe to it yeah well and again the funny thing too is for a long time these were just very basic utilitarian cars yeah and you know very recently like in the last two to five years they've become very collectible and more and more people are trying to snatch them up and they're they're gaining in popularity quite a bit but for the longest time you couldn't give these things away yeah and you know the as the overall Land Rover Defender Market which of course was the next evolution of this car is is that market matured these cars have started to follow and and kind of become more desirable with them as well have you got a Jack in this car somewhere for that tire no but when I off-road I throw one in the back yeah yeah [Music] I think a couple of people around here recognize you look like the car see when a turning radius is oh not bad look at that a little bit of Tire rub there yeah there we go and again that's one of the nice things about this car everything's so tough and bulletproof yeah kind of don't really worry about anything in this car nice little Alpha coming up behind us oh that is a cool car noodle hey watch your rolling she keeps rolling it's a pretty relaxing car to drive oh yeah can't really get up enough speed to have to worry about things although it gets a little stressful on the highway so which is why I try and avoid it I would imagine you want it yeah nice two-lane road is what you want yeah probably one of the coolest things about these vintage Land Rovers is that this was one of the cars that actually started the whole camel trophy and the camel trophy uh was these challenges that Land Rover put together to kind of Market the vehicles where they would take them into some of the most challenging environments they could get them into right and they took them all over the world so for example this was in one of the firsts which was actually in Zaire which is now modern day Democratic Republic of Congo right but they drove these uh I believe it was almost 1500 kilometers off-road through the Congo and in fact all but one car finished it and won they voluntarily uh stepped out which is why I didn't finish I got some dirt here we go let's give it a shot yo okay through the puddle watch that be 20 feet deep all right this is the way these things really come into their own this is what it was made for this is what it was made for that's right exactly this is probably what it did a lot of along the Berlin Wall back in the days just cruising on dirt roads that went alongside the wall well it doesn't stall doesn't get hot what more could he ask for right when I first got the car I took it to a Land Rover specialist to be checked out and they said and I said the weird thing is I keep smelling fuel so you took a look at it and he said yeah it's because your carburetor is leaking and it's every time you hit the accelerator it's spraying fuel onto the exhaust manifold and I said can you fix it today he said no I think you should come back another day and that was the time in which I realized I needed to take it to another uh repair place right because if someone was willing to let me drive home in a car that was spraying uh fuel onto the hot headers right exactly probably wasn't a shop I wanted to come back to and in fact that was the first repair I learned how to do myself I quickly figured out how to fix the carburetor and keep it from doing that do place a gasket is that what it was yeah it needed a couple of things tightened up on it a few hoses replaced it was actually but again you know having never done that on one of these cars it was pretty self-explanatory when you got under the hood and that's just one of the fun things about this car how long ago did you get it I've had this car now for probably about four years honestly it hasn't really required a whole lot of work yeah I mean it could use some fine tuning here and there but other than that everything major works fine not a lot of polishing the Chrome or anything hell yeah course it leaks like the devil everywhere it goes but that's one of the uh you know old sayings about it too right is how do you know that it needs more oil yeah when it stops leaking right right well I expect the perfect day to come by with this thing not too hot not too cold that's exactly right it's a big change for me 959 which shows you're a true car guy you don't have any particular feeling one way there just like everything yeah you know anything that's unique and anything where to me anything that was purpose built and anything that has history and again that that's one of the biggest things about car that actually it does share with the 959 is this is a car that really helped shape the history of the modern four-wheel drives that we drive today you know they weren't the only person innovating when it came to off-road but between the old Land Rovers and the old Jeeps they really kind of led the way yeah and a lot of the original Innovations in these cars from the four-wheel drive system on demand shift on the fly into four-wheel drive that's pretty advanced technology back then right and so you know both how it changed cars going forward and the role that it played in a lot of history just makes this car really special well thanks for bringing it up by I appreciate it my friend thanks so much for having me yeah next time it's happy getting you should give us a call oh yeah it's always a privilege to come by and share some of these stories with both you and some of your viewers as well good luck with your coffee company what's the name it's Drive coffee and you can find us at drivecoffee.com we'll check it out it'll keep you awake so you can drive this see you next week

Channel: Jay Leno's Garage

Views: 313,823

Keywords: Jay Leno, Jay Leno's Garage, car reviews, compares cars, classic cars, vintage cars, sports cars, super cars, cars, car gear, McLaren P1, Porsche 918 Spyder, Camaro Z28, jay leno garage, jay lenos garage, car collection, cnbc, episode, motorcycle, ford, corvette, tour, dodge, lexus, Land Rover, Drive Coffee, Alex Grappo, Berlin Wall, X Mod, Series 3, UK, British cars, Britain, Great Britain, United Kingdom, Queen

Id: AaKqFPY7ARE

Length: 32min 28sec (1948 seconds)

Published: Mon May 29 2023