I’ve rolled down the windows on this new Range Rover Sport to talk to some colleagues about where I’m going, and I leave them down as I head onto the road. As it mooches out of a car park and onto city streets, the Sport easily passes ‘the 50-metre test’: how good a car feels when you first get in and drive off.
Land Rovers, with their slick control weights and easy, predictable responses, always do. Within two minutes, I meet a motorway and, with wind noise increasing, haul up the windows.
The Sport immediately becomes one of the most isolated and quiet cars on the market. The same kind of isolation that we noticed in the full-size Range Rover, the Sport’s bigger sibling, feels very much replicated here. It comes as a surprise, but it shouldn’t do.
The two models have arrived within months of each other because they’ve been developed at the same time and share so much underneath.
Both the Range Rover and the Sport are based on Land Rover’s new Modular Longitudinal Architecture, primarily aluminium and said to be up to 35% more torsionally rigid than the outgoing car.
The Sport is shorter and lower than the car we will think of and refer to as its larger sibling, but there’s hardly anything in it dimensionally. They both use the same 2997mm wheelbase (the long-wheelbase Range Rover adds to that, obviously) and the Sport is 4946mm long to the Range Rover’s 5052mm. It’s the same 2047mm wide across the body and 2209mm with the mirrors out.
But it’s 50mm lower, at 1820mm. There’s a bit more difference in the weight. At first, I drive a Sport P530, which uses a BMW-sourced 4.4-litre V8 with 523bhp. It weighs 2430kg here, while the regular Range Rover with the same engine is 2510kg. A slightly bigger fuel tank (90 litres versus the Sport’s 80) will account for a tiny bit of that difference (weight is measured 90% fuelled) but not the rest, so there’s a little less of the Sport, and it doesn’t have the Range Rover’s split tailgate.
Mind you, 80kg sounds like a lot, but we’re only talking 3%. Mechanically, the biggest differences are probably in the suspension. Sure, both cars have double wishbones up front and a five-link set-up at the rear, with torque vectoring by braking, a locking rear differential, 48V active anti-roll bars and active rear steering, but where the Range Rover has single-chamber air springs, the Sport introduces a dual-chamber system, one of which has a variable volume to give it more dynamic variance.
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