Land Rover Experience, Eastnor Castle.

I would recommend anyone going to any LRE to upgrade to the full day, it is expensive but you get so much more out of it and as you say, less likely to have to share a car....... You were lucky to see a development vehicle on the site, usually they don't test on the days when the public are on site or the development vehicles scuttle into a hidey hole until you have passed! You have a camera so LR tend to be very careful about pictures of new products (and especially one as important as the Disco5) getting out into the public domain

(12-04-2016 10:32am)Pete Wrote:  I'd fully recommend stumping up the extra cash and going for the full day.

With the half day, you might find yourself with 2 or 3 other people and having to share the car. I'm not sure you'd get more than an hour total behind the wheel. For a full day, you'll get 4-5 hours of driving with one-to-one instruction. My instructor only drive for the first 15 mins or so and let me do the rest.

---

Oh, Eastnor is one of the development proving grounds, so you get to see some prototypes running about. We saw an Evoque that was testing something (no idea what, it was internal), and a camouflaged Discovery.

When I enquired, I was told that I could bring one or two people in the car with me but obviously the drive would be shared. I was planning to make a weekend away with my wife and another couple - general plan was for the blokes to do the half day while the wives went out shopping or relaxing, then go somewhere for an evening meal, night in a hotel and home in the morning. I think the wives might bend our ears if we were out all day.

Tim, during the briefing, everyone going out on that day were told that that development cars were out and about, but we were requested not to photograph them. The estate is a proving ground and used for the experiences, they don't many any effort to separate the two on a daily basis. The ones we saw certainly didn't make any effort to get out of view. We passed the Disco 5 in the public car park and exchanged a cheery wave (great shape in the flesh).

Steve, I get totally your situation there. I guess you can see the point that the full day will give you a broader, deeper experience of off-roading and that the half day is more of a taster course. In your case, it might be an idea to do the half day but keep the option of going back again by yourself for a full day at a later date.

Here's a vid I did at Eastnor, might interest you.

Nice video Phil. I remember the ruts looking a lot deeper than that and the front diff got polished more than a few times.

That big hill you have at 3:18 or so, I did the other way (going up). I managed it first time in the pouring rain which was quite an achievement - my instructor told me that most people fail to get up first time (or maybe he was brushing my ego).

I'll look at the video more later on when I'm not at work.

I've done a lot of off-roading in the past for work. However, always been in a manual and clutch control/slipping seemed to be the key to get in and out of bother. Just wondered what happens in an automatic where clutch control is sacrificed? I guess it's all brake and throttle, but I always find low speed movement in my automatic a bit awkward.

The anti-stall mechanism on the Defender is a thing to behold; you really do have to really stamp on the brake pedal to force it to stall. The result is that in low range mode, you can off-road without slipping the clutch at all - it's only needed for changing gear or coming to a halt. On the handling portion of the tour, I climbed a flight of concrete stairs just through idling in first.

I'd guess that it's the same in the automatic gearboxes in low-range. I wouldn't know how the Evoque would handle.

Can't remember if there was anti stall in my old series 3 low ratio. But you are right you can waddle up and down most things. Almost feels like you are going step by step.