The record
The Camel Trophy was an annual off-road endurance event, sponsored by the Camel cigarette brand, that ran from 1980 to 2000 and sent national teams across some of the hardest terrain on earth - the Transamazonica, Borneo, Zaire, Madagascar, Siberia and more. After the inaugural 1980 event was run in Jeeps, every Camel Trophy from 1981 to 1998 was contested in Land Rovers, and the fleets of identically prepared trucks in Sandglow yellow (LRC361, sold to this day as 'Camel Trophy Yellow') with olive-green event decals became one of the most recognisable liveries in motoring.
Range Rovers ran the 1981 and 1982 events and Series IIIs the 1983 Zaire event, before the coil-sprung One Ten and Ninety - the models renamed Defender in 1990 - carried the event from 1984 to 1989, with Range Rovers returning for 1987-88. Discoverys took over from 1990 (200Tdi, then 300Tdi from 1995), and Freelanders ran the last Land Rover event in 1998; the final 2000 event in Tonga-Samoa used boats. Event vehicles were extensively prepared: Safety Devices roll cages, winches, Brownchurch or Safety Devices roof racks, uprated suspension, auxiliary fuel tanks, modified electrics and full expedition equipment. Even during the Discovery years, Sandglow 110s soldiered on as support, communications and pre-scout vehicles - the trucks this record's winch-and-roof-rack 110 evokes.
The event mixed brutal driving and recovery work with timed special tasks, and its reputation was such that hundreds of thousands applied for national team places at its peak. Land Rover ended its involvement after 1998 as the event drifted towards adventure sport, and later filled the gap with its own G4 Challenge from 2003. Surviving team and support vehicles are now sought-after collector pieces, and Sandglow repaints of ordinary Defenders keep the livery a fixture of Land Rover shows; a US-team Defender 110 from the one-off winter event of 1998 appeared in the 'Great Expeditions' class at the 2025 Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance.
