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OBJECT 06: BOOTS Dan Dennehy’s boots have stepped out of a prototype Discovery onto every possible terrain and into some of the harshest conditions on the planet. He’s the Land Rover engineer tasked with ensuring that the All-New Discovery really can rove the land. That ability is central to the car’s DNA and its appeal to customers, and it has to do it better than its rivals. So Dan travels. His job starts at Land Rover HQ, defining what the new model’s critical dimensions should be for optimum capability: its approach, breakover and departure angles; its wading depth and side-slope angle. Then the car is modeled virtually, and those angles checked. The advanced virtual engineering software can even calculate what sort of traction it will generate on different surfaces, and what gradient it will be able to haul itself up. But even the most powerful virtual modelling will never replace real-world testing. So prototype vehicles are flown to the sands of Dubai and the boulders of the western United States, and driven to the snowy terrain of northern Sweden and the mud, grass and ruts of Land Rover’s UK test base at Eastnor Castle. “We don’t need to travel for mud,” Dan says. “We have plenty of that at home.” The teams testing the performance of the radical new range of four- and six-cylinder engines on the road and in extreme temperatures take the prototypes on a long tour of other, equally remote and difficult parts of the world. “These guys really put their heart and soul into these cars,” says Alex Heslop, Chief Engineer. “They’re incredibly passionate about what Discovery stands for. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t volunteer for three weeks’ duty at minus 20 in the Arctic, verifying that it deserves the name.” That dedication pays off. “We’ve made some huge leaps in specific abilities with the new Discovery,” says Dan. “But I think the real achievement has been making it more premium and refined, and at the same time making it more capable off-road too. We’ve tried to really improve its performance on every kind of terrain.” 49
