The Battle of the Off-Road Beaters: Ford F-150 Custom vs. Geo Tracker, Jeep Cherokee, Land Rover Discovery

Until you’ve realized that the phone in your pocket is still connected via Bluetooth to the car your co-worker just started outside your office window, which means he is now listening to Shakira’s Oral Fixation, Vol. 2, and the infotainment display is outing the music as yours, well, you can’t know the struggles we endure here at 1585 Eisenhower Place. It’s hard driving new cars all the time; sometimes you just gotta go for a run in a turd. That’s more or less how we decided the time had come for another beater challenge. Past such budget-burners have featured ice racing, a sort of street-car Olympics, and a cross-country scavenger hunt. For this installment, we decided to buy old 4x4s and fix them up so we could break them again. Pairs of editors were given $1500 budgets, which they promptly blew, and we devised a series of off-road abuses. The scoring was, to put it mildly, improvised.

Home / Reviews / The Battle of the Off-Road Beaters: Ford F-150 Custom vs. Geo Tracker, Jeep Cherokee, Land Rover Discovery - Comparison Tests VIEW 65 PHOTOS COMPARISON TESTS The Battle of the Off-Road Beaters: Ford F-150 Custom vs. Geo Tracker, Jeep Cherokee, Land Rover Discovery Four unprepared teams. Four disease-ridden $1500 vehicles. Three grueling days of mud, sand, and pavement. NOV 2016 BY JARED GALL MULTIPLE PHOTOGRAPHERS ILLUSTRATION BY PETE SUCHESKI SHARE TWEET From the December 2016 issue Until you’ve realized that the phone in your pocket is still connected via Bluetooth to the car your co-worker just started outside your office window, which means he is now listening to Shakira’s Oral Fixation, Vol. 2, and the infotainment display is outing the music as yours, well, you can’t know the struggles we endure here at 1585 Eisenhower Place. It’s hard driving new cars all the time; sometimes you just gotta go for a run in a turd. That’s more or less how we decided the time had come for another beater challenge. Past such budget-burners have featured ice racing, a sort of street-car Olympics, and a cross-country scavenger hunt. For this installment, we decided to buy old 4x4s and fix them up so we could break them again. Pairs of editors were given $1500 budgets, which they promptly blew, and we devised a series of off-road abuses. The scoring was, to put it mildly, improvised. VIEW 65 PHOTOS Reviews editor Josh Jacquot and your author immediately ­dismissed rationality. “We could buy a pretty nice Cherokee for $1500,” Jacquot observed, “but that’d be like buying a Camry.” Agreeing that insanity was the surest path to victory, we found a ’79 Ford F-150 missing the bed, fenders, and hood. The hood was not actually missing, but the seller wanted to keep it because he was using it as a sled to pull his kids around behind a snowmobile. Our test drive suggested that gravity and friction were standing in for threaded fasteners, as no part of the truck seemed to be securely attached to any other. But it rode on 44-inch tires and looked like a Mad Max prop, so we towed it home $1500 poorer and fully agreed that we had already won. Triumphantly, we parked it in front of the office. As our co-workers debated how comfortable they were even standing near it, deputy editor Daniel Pund and I climbed aboard for a joyride. The Ford stalled 12 feet later, refused to restart, and wouldn’t take a jump. As we pushed it back into its parking space, the power-steering pump puked its fluid. Lucky for us, our landlord likes oil stains. At least, we hope he does, because he now has a panoply. With more rock-crawling and dune-running experience than the rest of us combined, road-test editor Chris Benn and senior online editor Mike Sutton were early favorites, especially when they announced their intention to buy said “Camry.” They reasoned that when it comes to Jeep Cherokees, a late ’90s vintage would make the most sense, as it would be fitted with sturdier axles, plus airbags they could sell to pad the budget. But as Benn glanced over a Craigslist ad for an ’88 XJ, his seasoned eye caught something: lockable hubs on the front axle, not factory Cherokee equipment. The seller had neglected to mention in the ad that the Jeep sat on the burlier running gear from a ’79 Bronco, complete with shorter gears and locked front and rear differentials. In the cons column: The fuel tank had been relocated to the cargo area and fixed in place with fabric ratchet straps, the windshield was spider-webbed, and there was a distinct lack of doors. They snatched up their backwoods mash-up for $800.

Looking to maximize agility and minimize parts cost, Pund and assistant tech editor David Beard set their hearts on a Suzuki Samurai. They found one with an external roll cage that the seller told them “doesn’t look pretty, but that’s because I know it works.” That pitch apparently worked for other potential buyers, because it was sold out from under them. They found another that the seller said didn’t run so well because “it got stolen for a year and they didn’t take very good care of it.” Ultimately, the Pund/Beard team laid out $1200 for a 1990 Geo Tracker with a three-inch lift and an odo showing 130,000 miles. After a quick vacuuming, some Meguiar’s on the dash, and a loving exterior wash, it looked like an honest $3000 car—right up until your humble narrator did a cannonball onto the Tracker’s hood, because who needs a hood?

Our leaking liabilities successfully registered and insured, we set our schedule: We’d trundle 60 miles west to Bundy Hill, a 350-acre gravel-pit-cum-off-road-park in Jerome, Michigan. After a few days for recuperation and repairs, we’d long-haul 220 miles northwest to the dunes at Silver Lake State Park along Lake Michigan.
And then one morning we arrived at the office to find an old Land Rover, sans front bumper. Wanting in on the fun, creative director Darin Johnson had emailed a Craigslist link to editor-in-chief Alterman asking if he could dark-horse a Discovery into the competition. In retrospect, the one-word reply, “Boom,” might not have been permission so much as a prediction for the outcome. Rather than seek clarification from the boss, Johnson found and purchased a 2004 Disco near Chicago. While the rest of us ­worried about how many more heartbeats our rigs might have left, Johnson drove it the 300 miles home, then another 200 miles the ­following weekend visiting family in northern Michigan. It was there that it developed an ominous knock, requiring photo assistant Charley Ladd to rescue his teammate and tow the WasteLand Rover back to the office. And so began Car and Driver’s fourth ­quasi-periodic beater challenge.

Ford Focus RS with Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2 Tires

We have long admired RS Focuses from across the oceans, and now the formerly unattainable icon of Ford Performance is finally on our shores. In our hands, the new RS already has dominated a comparison test held in Europe against the Subaru WRX STI and the Volkswagen Golf R and has tackled the 24 turns of Virginia International Raceway in our annual Lightning Lap (where it turned a lap quicker than a V-8 Mustang achieved in 2015). But this is our first crack at the car on American roads—and the results were not quite what we expected. Only the most observant readers would notice that the biggest difference between the comparison-test car and the Lightning Lap car was the tires. Bone stock, the Focus RS comes from the factory on capable Michelin Pilot Super Sport radials. Like our Lightning Lap car, this example came with a $1990 wheel-and-tire package consisting of a specific 19-inch forged-aluminum wheel and as racy a tire as you can put on a street car, the Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2. This is the same rubber worn by exotics worldwide. Fun fact: The Focus RS has the first square (non-staggered) fitment for the Cup 2 in the U.S.—a small win for diagonal tire rotation.

Purchased on their own, a set of Cup 2s would cost about $1500 installed and the delicate-looking, Y-spoke wheels command $1395, so the package is something of a deal. And the more aggressive rubber brings an instant, tangible increase in performance to the RS. Stopping from 70 mph takes 154 feet, which is only four feet shorter than a Super Sport–shod RS, but lateral acceleration jumps from just below 1.00 g to 1.04 g. It’s that kind of lateral grip that allows the Cup 2–equipped RS to lap VIR as quickly as it does. This RS’s accelerative performance—zero to 60 mph in 4.6 seconds and a 13.4-second quarter-mile—is unchanged. There is no question that the RS is a feral beast, and on this ultrasticky rubber, it follows every last pavement crack, bump, and tar strip while the firm suspension keeps body roll in check. In the sterile lab of a well-groomed racetrack, this translates to a connection between car and driver that we dream of. VIEW 56 PHOTOS However, once you transition to Michigan’s far-from-perfect public roads, housebreaking the RS proves to be the frustrating stuff of a ride-and-handling engineer’s worst dreams. This RS vibrates like a paint shaker on two-lane roads; it borders on unlivable when respecting posted speed limits. Crank up the velocity to criminal levels, and the RS actually settles down a bit. The ride evens out and the steering stops favoring the road’s topographical features and starts to better hew to the driver’s desires. But it’s a lot to ask of a driver—say, his or her license—when a good car is at its best only when doubling the speed limit. The dampers are adjustable, but the stiffer of the two settings is seriously overdamped for public roads. This track weapon never feels settled, and neither do its white-knuckled passengers. Going with the base tire won’t fix the brutal ride on rough roads, but it will quell some of the tramlining.That sounds disappointing, we know. It’s a tough verdict for a car that otherwise has earned Rhodes Scholar–worthy marks in other situations. It wouldn’t be hard to imagine a much more pleasant experience on the smoother tarmac of Southern California, for instance.

Tires can make or break any car, but other vehicles wearing Cup 2s—even other Fords such as the Mustang Shelby GT350R—don’t have this duality, so we can’t put the blame entirely on the Michelins. If you plan to track your RS, the Cups 2s and Y-spoke wheels are a no-brainer. But if you plan to drive an RS every day, save the money. You won’t forgo any of the fun this car delivers with the standard Super Sports, and you’ll avoid making your passengers wish they’d taken an Uber.