With 626 hp, the Octa is the most powerful Defender ever, but it is also the most capable. To understand the auto industry, always follow the money. When the current Land Rover Defender launched for 2020 it was targeting those in search of rugged,

Land Rover announced that two Defender SUVs (Defender being its own brand these days) would be racing across five rounds of the W2RC in 2025, “with a three-car entry in the championship’s halo event,

The Defender is the best-selling member of the JLR family, and the one that has been steadily gaining in popularity for the past five years—a rare occurrence in the auto industry, where models normally lose ground as they age.

But Land Rover will point out that the Defender is eco-friendly in other ways. There’s a figure banding about that 75% of all Land Rovers ever made are still on the road, and most Defender buyers want them for their abilities. Think of it as a commercial vehicle rather than an SUV and it doesn’t look too bad.

Land Rover had shown the Discovery SVX in Frankfurt exactly two years earlier: a 525hp V8-powered, hydraulically-restrained vision of what the family-friendly SUV could be if you jettisoned some of the friendliness and fitted proper all-terrain tyres.

The competition vehicles will utilise the same 4.4-litre twin-turbocharged V8 petrol engine as in the standard road car.