Land Rover Range Rover Sport news - Rangey Sport goes 500bhp - 2009

See more Range Rover Sport pics

Fresh from a mid-life facelift, the new Range Rover Sport is here. The big news is that it's got the supercharged 5.0-litre V8 from the Jaguar XKR. Which means 503bhp - that's more power than a Cayenne Turbo - and a sub-six-second 0-60mph time.
 
Oh, and it'll lap the Nurburgring in under nine minutes. Whether that's an appropriate thing for a big SUV to be doing is quite another matter, but you can't deny it's an impressive stat.
 
If you require a bit more social acceptability from your RRS, you can also have it in 3.0-litre V6 turbodiesel flavour, as seen in the stunning Jag XF Diesel S. It puts out 242bhp and, more significantly, a punchy 443lb ft of torque. It'll also manage just over 30mpg, some eight per cent better than the old 2.7-litre V6 diesel, which developed a measly 188bhp. The Rangey Sport is still available with the old 3.6-litre V8 diesel, but the one you really want is the V6.
 
The RRS has received a whole load of visual tweaks, too, with a narrow grille and squarer headlights and taillights featuring something the LR designers call ‘a two-bar motif'. It looks sharp. It looks good.
 
On-road manners should be improved courtesy of a new continuously variable damping system, active anti-roll bars and upgraded brakes.
 
LR assures us that ‘over 3,000' components have been revised on the Range Rover Sport (a shiny penny to anyone who can name them all!), with the aim of providing a clearer differentiation between the keep-it-on-the-road Sport and the take-it-anywhere Range Rover, which has also been facelifted, along with the Land Rover Discovery.
 
The big Range Rover gets a plusher interior and the same 5.0-litre V8 - but no 3.0-litre V6 diesel - while the Discovery 4 gets a detuned verson of the big V8 putting out 375bhp.
 
We'll see all the new Landies in the UK this summer. Prepare the spray-on mud.

Now watch Clarkson attempt to outrun a Challenger tank in the Range Rover Sport: