This Used Range Rover Sport Is A 385bhp, £6k Bargain All-Rounder

As an exercise in box-ticking, a used supercharged RR Sport takes some beating, but are you brave enough to take the plunge?

Matt Robinson

23 Nov 2018

This Used Range Rover Sport Is A 385bhp, £6k Bargain All-Rounder

This week, Land Rover revealed an all new version of the Range Rover Evoque. As much as we’re digging the refreshed, Velar-like styling, though, if we had to have something from the family, it’d be the Range Rover Sport.

A long time has passed since the very first RR Sport - which Jeremy Clarkson famously used in an attempt to escape from a tank - burst onto the scene, and that means the earliest cars are now utter bargains. You can pick up a diesel for well under £5000, or if you want to do things properly with a supercharged V8, there are plenty kicking around for £6000 and up.

The 4.2-litre V8 under the bonnet of these vehicles is good for 385bhp, making 0-60mph possible in just over seven seconds. That may seem a little pedestrian compared to the current crop of preposterously fast performance SUVs, but still enough to give a VW Golf GTI of the same vintage something to worry about at the traffic lights. Plus, you certainly won’t be able to argue with the noise.

While the current Sport is built on the same platform as the full-fat Range Rover, this one was based on the Discovery 3’s part-monocoque, part-ladder chassis architecture. The 4.2-litre supercharged V8 made way for a significantly more powerful 5.0-litre version in 2009, which dropped the 0-60mph time under five seconds.

The bigger-engined car will set you back upwards of £15,000, however, which makes this 4.2 rather tempting. It’s clocked 122,000 miles, has a full-service history, recently had a £2400 gearbox rebuild, and is yours for £6495.

The decision to buy a used Sport shouldn’t be taken lightly, of course. The gearbox rebuild is good news, but there are plenty of other expensive potential issues that can hit these cars, perhaps the most concerning being air suspension faults. You’re also rarely going to see anything over 20mpg from that V8, or even double figures if you really lack control with your right foot.

Regardless, an early RR Sport remains an alluring used buy that ticks a lot of boxes. Would you?

Growing up on a diet of World Rally Championship highlights and lengthy Gran Turismo 2 sessions, a life in cars was as good as inevitable for Matt.

Comments

£6,000 a month in repairs

And insurance and fuel, damn.

Well, Doug DeMuro’s Range Rover almost caused Carmax to go bancrupt, and Tyler Hoover was so displeased with all the issues his one had that he decided to bury it…

They both purchased badly maintained cars then continued to run them as if they where cheep cars, they where asking for evey single problem they got.

only if it comes with unlimited mileage bumper to bumper warranty

It’s a bargain only until repair bill comes in.

and the 5.0 versions had a habit of destroying the front end of the engine, if i remember correctly…

Every single comment about reliability is from someone that has never owned a Rangy, if you like a couple of well know YouTubers and just treat a 100,000k car new as a banger yes it will break down a lot, if you keep up with the maintenance including servicing the correct parts when they should be done, Not waiting for bits to break then bodging it! They are perfectly reliable cars, people that own them and respect them for the complex mechanisms they have love them. If you want a car to spend no money on and it work dont try and buy the king of the road🤣

If you throw money at a car and it doesn’t break, that doesn’t mean it’s reliable. Just because a babied example doesn’t break doesn’t mean that the vehicle in question generally has a below-average tendency to break.

What you’re implying is that people are idiots for not spending the car’s value in repairing it every couple months. In reality, dumping money you’ll never get back into a practically value-less car is a completely senseless thing to do. Might as well make a beater out of it at that point.