50 Years of Range Rover

A huge snow graphic is created and Anthony Joshua does a few laps around the Swedish test track

Land Rover begins their golden jubilee celebrations this year, marking 50 years since the first Range Rover model was released. To commemorate this grand milestone, Land Rover enlisted the help of two people.

The first person being World Heavyweight Champion, Anthony Joshua OBE, and the second being British snow artist, Simon Beck. Together, they put on a spectacular display which surely won’t be quickly forgotten.

Taking place in the Arjeplog cold weather test facility close to the arctic circle in Sweden, which is essentially just a large, snow-covered plane, Simon Beck got to work by filling in the centre of the steering pad with a ‘50 years’ graphic, measuring 260 metres in width!

From up high, this graphic looks like it could have been machine-made. It’s near-perfect, with excellent and nearly symmetrical geometry and neat typography which looks like it had come straight from a computer.

However, the entire graphic was created one footstep at a time. Over 45,000 steps in this deep and thick snow, to be more exact.

The only tools Simon Beck used were his feet, some snowshoes and a pair of walking poles. Beck, of course, is not just your ordinary guy making patterns in the snow. He’s been doing this for over 15 years and probably knows everything there is to know about creating huge graphics in the snow.

As this was going on, Anthony Joshua had the pleasure of enjoying the warmth of a plush Ranger Rover Sport SVR as he had the chance to nail it around the icy track of Arjeplog. This test facility is also the home to the Jaguar Land Rover Ice Academy, where customers can experience the same thing that Anthony Joshua had the pleasure of enjoying, with the tutorage of Academy instructors.

Here’s a not-at-all-canned quote straight from the world champ himself:

“I’m really looking forward to June because the Range Rover family will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of one of Britain’s finest exports and I’ll be defending my world title belts. I’ll be travelling to my fight with Kubrat Pulev in London on 20 June in my new personalised Range Rover SVAutobiography and I can’t think of a better way to arrive. Nothing can match its combination of comfort and capability – I guess that’s what you get after five decades of experience.”

Anthony Joshua is quite well-known for driving a Range Rover. Especially so in 2018 when his custom Range Rover was stolen using the kind of keyless-entry method that we have written about in the past.

Ever since the very first Range Rover was released in 1970, the brand name has gone from strength to strength. Starting off, at first, as being well-known for excellent all-terrain performance and robustness, the ‘Range Rover’ name is now also known as being an extraordinary symbol of luxury, quality and class.

Gerry McGovern OBE, Chief Creative Officer, Land Rover, said: “Over five decades the Range Rover has evolved into the most desirable luxury SUV in the world. Its peerless combination of sophisticated design, refinement and capability has struck an emotional chord with customers all over the globe.”

And we can’t say we can argue with that!

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