My neighbour is on the look out for a 130 Tipper for his Tree Surgery business as he is sick of expensive parts for his current vehicles. We are off up to the Defender Centre in a couple of weeks to have a look at their range of tippers. Would be nice if he does buy one as we will then have three land Rovers in our street. A 90, One Ten and a 130.

The PC game, with a RRP of £19.99, is available to every reader of the July issue of Land Rover International magazine. Just fill in the form on the front cover and enclose £1.99 for Postage and Packaging and you could be soon racing your favourite 4×4 across a variety of terrain.

Including the following Solihull vehicles (what no series?):

• Defender 90 Station Wagon
• Range Rover Sport Supercharged
• Discovery 3
• Freelander 2
• Range Stormer Concept
• SVX Concept

and three different off-road courses; Water, Desert & Ice. Time to show the Range Rover Sport that the good old Defender 90 is still king of the road!

Featuring:

• 18 officially licensed Ford and Land Rover off road vehicles. (Including concept vehicles not seen in any other game).
• 12 distinct race types.
• 24 detailed tracks.
• 3 beautifully detailed off road environments.
• Real time, on-the-go damage repair.
• Pick up and play handling.
• Discover hidden routes.
• Power sliding – throw powerful trucks around the tracks.
• In-game pickups: Discover repair pods, time extensions, artifacts and cash.
• Multi-player racing via split screen

It features different 4×4’s driving up some extreme (and not in a Scorpion racing way ) cliffs and rocks. The first and last clip are simply incredible.

And there I was getting all excited about a little mud!

There we were, driving sideways at 40 – 50mph with the back end hanging out and great chunks of mud flinging in an arc behind us and huge grins on our faces when my neighbour pointed over to a little gully and said “go through that”… and so we did.

Now, being a farmer he should have known better (I’m laying the blame for this squarely on his shoulders!) and as we tried to pull our way out of the quagmire we got stuck.

In this small dip/gulley was an underground stream and this had turned the area into a bog and we were firmly stuck. At first we just tried to rock our way out in low range and difflock, then we tried winching, but unfortunately there was nothing to winch off apart from a few trees at the very end of the wire so we had to do a single line pull. This got us a few inches further forward but we were digging ourselves deeper and deeper into the mud.

As we weren’t planning on doing anything silly, I had left the spade, jack and sand ladders back in the garage and all we had were our hands. We tried digging our way out as much as possible and stuffing sticks under the wheels but even with the winch and mud tyres it wasn’t working, so we gave up and phoned the wife who came and collected Steve, drove him home so he could feed the cows and then bring the tractor back and tow me out.

Further pictures in the “Proper Stuck Gallery”

And no, I don’t really blame Steve

I found a few more after uploading these photos but couldn’t be bothered adding them just now. One of them is a foam Freelander I bought for 10p at our local jumble sale.