Discovery 2 in the Spirit of Camel Trophy
 

The purpose of this truck is to be good at everything both on-and off road. Every modification must be purposeful and most importantly, period correct. The truck must present and clean up well so as not to lose too much value, but also have just enough patina and "forest pinstripes" to not feel bad about dragging a branch down the side.

While it won't be Sandglow yellow, it will be built as if it were to be used in a 1999 Camel Trophy event. It will be used not only for daily street driving, but also for exploring trails in Northern California and beyond. The whole idea is to be able to make it through the toughest terrain without body/mechanical damage, and still be able to drive home at 90mph on the freeway in comfort.

I purchased the D2 on 4/17/2018 with 228k miles. As of today, it now has 233k miles.

Modifications include:

Drivetrain

• All stock aside from a retrofitted D1 Center Differential Lock (CDL) linkage

Exterior

• Wheels - OEM 16x7" ET57 steel wheels
• Tires - BFGoodrich KO2 265/75/16
• Lift - OME 2" Lift eliminating rear air suspension
• Bumper - Front ARB Discovery 1 bull bar Front Safari Gard from D1
• Winch - Harbor Freight/Badland 12k model (I know, but it came with the truck and works great.)
• Lights - 2x 100w halogen IPF 800 driving beams, 4x 100w halogen KC Competition spot beams, 1x 55w auxiliary reverse light
• Skid plates - Front & rear, brand unknown
• Rock sliders - Brand unknown
• Roof Rack - Safety Devices OEM D2 roof rack compatible with roof rails and sunroofs.

Interior

• Cobra 19 Ultra 3 CB radio with 4 ft Firestik antenna & PA speaker

The lists above will grow with time. See latest posts for most current photos.

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Beautiful truck, love the steelies. You must be out of your mind driving 90 mph in a Disco, though, especially a lifted Disco.

Looks like you're using it. Personally, I wouldn't envy a Camel Trophy rig. They were 8000 pounds and had 111hp and 195ftlbs torque. I think we could generally speculate a Discovery 2 has half the weight and twice the power - and while nobody thinks of the Disco2 as over-powered, the Camel Trophy trucks were complete pigs. They were ugly too with stupid rally-race style light bars for the kind of high-speed desert racing they couldn't possibly aspire to. The worm-gear winches they had were really cool pieces of machinery, but they are a severe penalty on the kind of lightweight vehicle the Discovery was designed to be. The Camel Trophy vehicles did not have clamp-on roof racks, but they had steel roll-cages that the bars on the roof bolted to. It added a stupid amount of steel weight to the roof as did all the gear the loaded on the racks so the cars didn't have the kind of low center of gravity that makes a vehicle perform well on and off-road. Camel Trophy was an exhibition of doing stupid stuff the hard way. It created a lot of appealing images, and I'm sure it was a great experience for those who got the chance to be involved, but it's not a good example to follow. To see what Land Rover learned from it, just look at the lame G4 thing.

The problem is, the CT events were a big part of why I went with a Rover as an off-roader to begin with. So their marketing worked. It totally makes sense that those rigs were heavy as a result of being over-built, but I still do admire what they were capable of for having relatively small tires and not much of a lift. I know I won’t be doing a rollcage-mounted roof rack or anything, but it’s a fun thought. Regarding the power/weight, there’s really no way around it. Even in stock form the D2 is slow. It’s mostly just about having fun and finding any excuse possible to get away from the computer and go outside, and it’s doing an amazing job at that.

Keep doing what you do, some folks will never understand modifying a Land Rover and are against most any change. Including those that add to safety.

Great looking D2, keep getting it muddy

Half wrong, half right. If you're presumably quoting wikipedia on the hp/torque values... you are forgetting they used a variety of plants, all were honestly ok, arguably better in almost every way than the gas motors except hp. If you've driven any of the plants NA through the Tdi motors, they are just fine off road because they are geared that way with the transfer boxes. The vehicles were heavy pigs but for what they were fairly nimble, a lot of the added material was an expedient because it was made to be beat up, hence lots of steel racks/cages/bars. Not sure what your argument is on the worm gear winches as a weight thing... They are heavy but so were the equivalent 8274 warns that they alternated between on certain years. They were made to pull loads, not be light-weight. Worm gear drive winches are used because they are a nice design for sustained workloads and heat. Although they had huge budgets considering the quantity of vehicles and equipment, they had to do it in-house with local materials, so it was pointless for them to go from say steel to alu roof racks if the teams are still going to bash tree limbs and roll the cars over anyway. The Discovery roof rack was bolted to the roll cage, but the Defender racks were sill-mounted and tied into the tub and front hoop. Haha ugly is subjective, they looked just fine, and the lights were for workspace illumination, not to look fast. You will see often several sets of lamps broken during events and they required full sets to run minimum illumination in some cases because of this.

You sound like a lot of fun to be around watching off road events... What he is doing is fine. Really anything "camel trophy" you want to put a cage on (not a terrible idea at all), it was basically the first thing they did to factory vehicles in the skunk works unit.

All Land Rover learned between Camel and G4 is they had to make the events easier because their current production non-defender cars could NOT do the same sort of event hardship that the simpler camel vehicles could... It's marketing.

Oh and OP, very cool wheel choice, and smart to have the steering guard. Nice.

I just wrote that I wouldn't envy a CT vehicle because there are a lot of advantages to be had over what they ran in CT. See CT for what it really was and not through some kind of irrational nostalgia or Land Rover fan-boy lens. It can be done much better, and so CT is not an ideal to aspire to.

I didn't make a case against cages, I just mentioned the weight they add and that a lot of it is up high. I think one has to look at the trade-off's with a cage and most importantly, consider that safety isn't a check-box. I am pro-safety and pro-cage. But you can't just make yourself safe by checking the "cage" box. You really have to consider your risks. A cage might not be as important as a seat, harness, window net, and helmet. You might also need to pull the glass. The idea that you're being safer just by adding a cage is false. But generally speaking, cages are an important *part* of safety systems.

Worm gear winches are awesome -- probably the best design out there for a high duty-cycle application -- but 125 pound 10,000lb rated winches aren't a good fit on the front bumper of a lightweight recreational 4x4. You will notice that the Superwinch Husky winch does not fit on any aftermarket bumper for the Land Rover Discovery. The winch will not fit between the frame rails. It has to be mounted in-front of and above the frame rails, which gives a poor result for approach angle and ruins the car's balance and handling. Most recreational offroading is better served using snatch-blocks with a lightweight planetary gear winch that is not rated higher than the GVWR. The Husky is not even used in competitive winching events because it is also extremely slow. It's really a great tool for an altogether different job.

My point about the lights is that they did not use the kind of workspace illumination lights they actually needed. Look at them. They are all forward-facing, narrow-beam, rally lights from Hella. All of them. It was sheer stupidity just to make eye-candy for marketing images.