I think Dr. Autobahn is going to work some mastering magic on it so might be worth waiting for that.
05.03.2026 09:17
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I think Dr. Autobahn is going to work some mastering magic on it so might be worth waiting for that.
I have received your Dr Marten boot.
How best to send you the full horror of Hammered In A 90s Euro Airport?
There is!
It's mostly the sound of a man who'd just got a JP-8000 plug-in and gone a bit giddy with it.
A while ago @spraypopmusic.com invited people to remix their track Hammered In An Airport and I started to have a crack at something. Can't remember why I was aiming for a sort of 90s generic dance anthem but anyway, here's a snippet. Should have sent this to @ricardoautobahn.co.uk at the time.
True, but I think with the right tone he'd have had enough equity to ride that wave, as TG and Marques Brownlee did with their generally enthusiastic reviews (both of which managed not to feel like paid promotion). As it is, he needlessly torpedoed his own credibility.
Tonally that Cybertruck was all wrong. He could have dispensed interesting facts without making the whole thing sound like an ad. And he came across terribly badly when he got called out on it on The Smoking Tire.
If you own a 1980s Audi quattro, or you know someone who does, please listen to the start of today's new Smith and Sniff. We're appealing for help on behalf of a listener.
Also, new episode out today in which we reveal how our podcast almost killed a listener and his mate. podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/s...
Some people have asked for refunds on their tickets to our Smith and Sniff charity show this week so we've got three places going spare. Go here to bag one of the spaces... www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1982768765...
I'm thinking more The Rest Is Bollocks.
Earlier this week Smith and Sniff was sitting at number 129 in the chart of all podcasts. All podcasts. Every single one. And our shite. Considering Gary Lineker's company alone makes about 128 different podcasts, we're quite proud of that. Thank everyone.
There is just ONE ticket left for next week's special Smith and Sniff live show in aid of Mission Motorsport. ONE. Also, five tickets left for our Beaulieu show in April. Links to tickets here... smithandsniff.com/pages/live
In fairness, this has always been a silly notion and it would probably be just as slippery to reverse down Golf Terrace or Astra Avenue.
A street sign for a road called Allegro Walk
More aerodynamic if you go down it backwards.
While blithering on about suspicious spy shots of the Freelander earlier, I forgot to include a link to the episode of When Rover Met BMW featuring the night time test driving. Here it is. youtu.be/w4q1Jr3r7c0?...
Wow, that's a real rarity in the wild.
Ah yes, I meant to say, the pics look very much like they've been taken from video. And in 1996 lots of stuff was still shot on SP.
ARSELANDER. I think they tried to claim Freelander was already on the list, but who knows? What's strange is that Highlander was considered as the name for the Discovery, or so rumour had it, so you'd think the lawyers would have known already that Volvo owned it.
Funnily enough, Highlander was owned (in Europe at least) by Volvo and this nixed LR's hope of using it. But they only discovered this after tooling up the rear bumper with an inset for a badge of the proportions of Highlander so its replacement had to be of similar length, hence Freelander.
Hmph, image didn't upload on first message in this thread. Here's it is; the spread from Autocar with the engine shot. Fishy, eh?
So there we go. If you've ever wondered how Autocar got some mysterious nocturnal pics of a top secret new Land Rover over a year before launch, I think it was down to When Rover Met BMW and a leak from something other than a prototype engine.
Also, in the BBC show, engineering boss Nick Stephenson is driving the car and enthusing about how torquey it is. The first petrol powered Freelander had a 1.8-litre K-series and, sir, that was not a torquey engine. I think he's definitely driving a V6 in that footage.
The engine in Autocar's scoop is the KV6, which wasn't available when the Freelander was launched. But the car in the When Rover Met... sequence is clearly an auto though there was no auto Freelander at launch, and it sounds like a V6. So...
But I do wonder if Autocar's unblurred pics were from some sneak grabbing the original footage shot for the show. Especially since there's a smoking gun here...
During filming of this test, a coolant hose popped off and the engineers had to pop the bonnet to investigate. The engine bay, like the rest of the car on screen, was blurred out for the transmitted version, as you can see here...
It's the dark shot of the engine bay that's weird. How did they get that? Well, remember the BBC series When Rover Met BMW, aired a few months after this Autocar story? One episode featured a sequence in which a proto Freelander was tested under cover of darkness...
Browsing the excellent @autocarofficial.bsky.social digital archive I found this scoop of the original Land Rover Freelander, published a year before the car was officially announced. But there's something fishy about the pics...
And then at the beginning of April, we're back to doing one of our normal live shows, this time at National Motor Museum in Beaulieu. www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1982006830...
