Pop the hood of most Land Rover Defenders of the older ilk and what you will see is a variety of engines that make more noise and vibrations than power.
Yes, they give the vehicle character, but that won't keep you warm during a longer ride where it becomes a race between which of the two (the noise or the vibration) will be the first to kill your neurons one by one. And if they fail to do it, then the painful lack of speed will surely get every last one of them.
Still, people love an old Defender, and it's easy to understand why. All you need to do is look at one of them. The simplicity of the design is something you just can't find these days, and since it remained virtually unchanged for so long it became so well-engrained in our brains, we will instantly identify them just by their shape or any tiny detail for that matter.
The owner of this absolutely stunning restomod had a very clear thought in his mind when he bought a red Land Rover Defender 110 that was over 30 years old. He kept it for less than two months before sending it over to Fusion Motorsport (FM) to have it completely redone in a way that would make it a lot more usable, not to mention exciting.
Well, the team over at FM worked on every last bolt—quite literally since all those exposed have been replaced with stainless steel ones—and came up with one of the coolest Defender pickups you're ever likely to see. This thing looks awesome, and things only go up from there once you hear about what it has under the hood.
It uses a Chevrolet Corvette 6.2-liter LT1 V8 engine, the kind you could find on the C7 model and can still buy in a brand-new Camaro SS. In stock form, the powerplant makes roughly 460 hp, but with a bit of tuning, it's said to produce around 500 for the Defender restomod. The gearbox is an eight-speed automatic carried over from the Camaro, which means it should get along just fine with the engine and make as few problems as you would expect from a tried and tested combination.
Even if it's a Defender and it has permanent all-wheel-drive and locking diffs, it's highly unlikely the new owner will take it off-roading. With that much carbon fiber around, who can blame him? It also has 20-inch wheels wrapped in 32-inch tires, so it's not exactly equipped for rock crawling. Hell, it even has an automatic step that deploys when the door is open—imagine scraping that against a ledge.
The two-seater is definitely a car meant to be enjoyed now, and by that, we mean both by those inside and the ones lucky enough to catch a glimpse of it. Imagine hearing the V8 roar coming down the street and expecting to see a Corvette or Camaro blasting down, only for a grey Defender to show up. Well, you don't need to imagine; you can just watch the clip below.
"Boy meets car, boy loves car, boy gets journalism degree and starts job writing and editing at a car magazine" - 5/5. (Vlad Mitrache if he was a movie) Full profile
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