Bowled over

Scenarios playing out in my mind span a spectrum between mildly embarrassing and seriously bloody awkward, tending toward the latter. I can see Dave silently withdrawing into himself like a tortoise confronted by a cat, and I can hear a world weary intake of breath as he realises this is about to become one of those difficult days.

Other limbs are moving now, mine as it happens, hands and arms working to apply what I hope is an appropriate amount of opposite lock, a right foot less sure of itself but opting to press down rather than lift off and a left leg surreptitiously scouting for locations where it too can brace for impact.

The mind is now war-gaming various scenarios. The ditch is deep, but narrow, not unlike the one into which I briefly disappeared in the first Lancia Integrale Evo to reach British shores a little more than 30 years ago. That resulted in concussion and broken ribs going a hell of a lot slower and with an entire ton of weight less momentum. But this Defender is built like a multi-storey car park by comparison and we’re both strapped into proper race seats with proper six point harnesses, proper Stilos on our noggins and encased within an impressive looking roll cage. We’re probably going to be alright.

At least at first. When I binned the Lancia the damage had been done by the ditch, along which it had rotated like a gyroscope before spitting itself back onto a nice, wide, open road. We didn’t have that here: if the Defender followed a remotely similar trajectory, and all the indications were that it would travel further and faster, we’d go down into the ditch, back onto the path, straight across it and into a tree.

That’s the moment you realise that somehow finding a way to salvage this situation is more important than was at first apparent, by which I mean about a tenth of a second ago. If you don’t do something very shortly, by which I mean sometime during the next tenth of a second or so, you may soon be regretting getting out of bed this morning.

I remember well the last time I was in this situation. It was about eight years ago and I was driving an old Ariel Atom on a soaking wet Brecon Beacons road; it had one of those roll-induced, power off turn in oversteer moments to which those earlier cars were prone and suddenly I was looking over the edge of a very steep drop. Not quite driving off the side of a mountain perhaps, but not far off. So you find a way.

Which is what I did that time and this. I’m not sure precisely what I did in either case because having finally provided enough data to keep my brain not just apparently but actually quite busy, I was a bit too preoccupied to be taking notes. But the Atom didn’t fall off a mountain and the Defender didn’t harpoon a tree. There was a noise, but it turned out just to be Dave exhaling with relief, deflating like a punctured accordion as that sharp intake of breath left his body. I thought I heard him murmur ‘well done’ but whether he actually did and to whom he may have been speaking at the time remains unclear.

The whole event did rather illustrate that however experienced a driver you are, being thrown into a genuinely new situation can make you feel like a teenager with L-plates. Because while I’ve driven a few rally cars before, this was the very first time I’d driven one on a stage going not at whatever speed felt easy and comfortable, but as fast as I could make it go. And it was far more difficult than I imagined.

The reason I’d got it so wrong was, to be blunt, arrogance. I knew the Bowler Defender Challenge was probably about as gentle an introduction to the rallying world as there is. The cars are Defender 90 P300s, with their 296bhp and eight-speed auto boxes left as standard. I knew too that the weight saved by ripping out the interior was offset almost exactly by all the stuff it has to carry for competition – roll cage, fire suppressant systems, underbody protection and so on, so it still weighs around 2.2 tonnes. It’s also limited to around 90mph, which didn’t sound very fast.

The Bowler Defender Challenge launched in 2022 as ‘a one make rally series designed to act as a feeder series for global rally-raid competitions, including the annual Dakar Rally’ to quote the official blurb. That went well enough for Bowler to launch for 2023 the Defender Rally Series which will feature 12 teams competing in nine fixtures, six of them public events where they’ll be up against other rally cars of all shapes and sizes. Competitors include everyone from grizzled veterans to complete novices. Dave tells me plenty of customers are people like me who have done many years of circuit racing and just fancy a new challenge. Like me, that is, in all regards save the financial: the car costs £130,000, though that does come with full support for the first season’s competition thrown in.

And the Defender is more tricked up than I had presumed. For strength and reliability it has additional bracing for its monocoque, rally-spec engine and gearbox mounts, and suspension turret braces. For performance it comes with bespoke suspension with rally springs, adjustable Fox dampers and new front suspension geometry. The ABS and ESC is reprogrammed with a bespoke ‘Bowler mode’ which unlike in the road car disables all the electronic safety nets, ABS included, and there is just one gearshift paddle which you pull to change up and push to change down. The car is completely road legal and comes on the same BF Goodrich AT extreme off road tyres you can spec on your standard street Defender, albeit mounted on bespoke Bowler 18in rims.

In and of itself, it is an incredibly easy car to drive, which is important when you are on such inconsistent and unreliable surfaces and the irresistible force that is you never far away from any number of immovable objects that line the tracks around Walter’s Arena where we meet. Like all heavy but fundamentally well set up competition cars, it gets better the faster you go. If you’re braking into a slippery downhill hairpin you have to start early and even then only very limited levels of ambition will see you into the apex. In such conditions it feels sluggish and every kilo of its weight.

Get it moving smartly however and the mass just seems to fall away. I needed constant exhortations from Dave to use the muddy grass verge as part of the course because my entirely track-based competition experience equates sodden grass with bad news and instinctively steered me away from it, but once dialled into this new way of driving – and it is nothing less than that – I was amazed at how precisely this vast, high and heavy machine could be fired between the trees. I tried the transmission in both auto and manual modes and think that now I’d be quicker and safer letting the powertrain make the decisions, but could see a point on the learning curve where you’d want to do it yourself. But really the car’s pace lies not in its acceleration, but its suspension.

Those Fox shock absorbers, the new geometry and rally springs contrive to provide astonishing stability and bizarre ride comfort. If you’re thinking you’d be pinballing about in the car, nothing could be further from the truth. It provides such a reassuring platform that confidence grows rapidly and you soon find yourself committing to moves that could have horrendous consequences if they went wrong – such as threading through a narrow kink at 80mph where one line alone will avoid an unwanted interaction with the environment – because you know it won’t happen. Even when the Defender leaves the ground it does so with such grace the only way you know for sure you’ve parted company with the planet is that the steering doesn’t work any more.

I wouldn’t say I loved the Bowler Defender Challenge car; the experience was too alien and I was not in it for long enough for there to be a chance of that. But I was intrigued. I found the whole experience considerably more difficult than I’d anticipated which is probably a good thing, for if it had been easy there would be little to learn and little reason therefore to want to progress. And I do want to progress. Suffice to say it has piqued my interest more than a little, enough to want to do a proper test and, if that goes well, maybe even an event. We’ll see if that’s even possible in the New Year.

More information on the Bowler Defender and the rally series can be found here.