The Twelve Drives of Christmas - 08. A Rover to the Sahara.

2012 was a year of two very contrasting roadtrips.  In February, we'd headed up to the snowy coast of Scandanavia, to drive on the frozen Arctic Ocean.  So what's the opposite of that?  How about 40 degreesC in the Sahara Desert?  Yeah, that would do it.

There was one similarity between the two trips though - both made use of a big old British barge of a car.  But the similarity didn't go much deeper than that, because let's face it, there's not that much similarity between a 1972 Rover P6 V8 and the Jag XJ40 we took to the Baltic.

And the Rover encountered much heavier going on the trip.  Whereas the Jag had sailed through its trip without missing a beat, the Rover had more than its fair share of reliability issues on the trip to Africa, and didn't endear us like the Jag had.

Car:  1972 Rover P6 3500 V8

Cost: £800

Modifications - de-silenced exhaust.  And stickers.  Lots of stickers.

Breakdowns: A few, mainly centred on overheating issues in the High Atlas Mountains.

Ben's rating: 6/10.  We never really gelled with the big old Rover, and it's not really a trip car we reminisce about.  In hindsight, there were probably better choices out there... though to it's credit, it made it to the Sahara and back.

You can read the full story of MoroccoV8 in this article:

https://www.autoclassics.com/posts/reviews/sahara-rover-p6-v8-ben-coombs

Or, if you'd rather just like to check out some of the trip photos, scroll on down...