How to choose your next shooting vehicle

This year has seen the cosy bonhomie of the gunbus consigned to the past, for now at least. On our small shoot back home, we’ve been doing our best to walk between drives, but the last couple are a fair walk, so we’ve been piling into cars to make the hop to the other side of the farm. It’s a motley caravan of cars, pickups, estate cars, SUVs, and a Landy with a snorkel. It’s quite a majestic sight, seeing a teams-worth of vehicles snaking down a track.

 

But what makes a good shooting vehicle? Knowing the answer to this question can not only help you avoid acute embarrassment and endless ribbing (as a friend who arrived in a white drop-top sports car learned too late) but can also help make a shoot day run smoothly, safely and comfortably. Here are some things to consider when you’re choosing a new vehicle for shooting.

Style is, as I’ve alluded to before, central to the tradition of driven game shooting in the UK. But the style is fluid, depending on the kind of shoot and the individual. At some estates, bespoke shooting rig-outs and gleaming luxury SUVs are the order of the day. At others the breeks are full of holes and held up with bailer twine, and the transport, if there is any, is more likely to be an aged and battered pickup with a couple of bales slung in the back. Both of these are perfectly reasonable choices, of course. Therefore the ‘perfect’ new shooting vehicle must look equally at home pulling up outside Belvoir Castle or Bog Farm on the morning of a shoot.

 

Your shooting vehicle mustn't look out of place outside a smart house

Great Britain is blessed with a wide variety of landscapes and environments. That’s what makes shooting in this country such a varied activity, and such a broad church. And shooting often takes place in the tougher of these landscapes. One thing unites all great shooting vehicles is the ability to go anywhere. Four-wheel drive is compulsory – you never know when you might encounter a steep bank or deeply rutted track but you must also have decent suspension – rough country shouldn’t mean a rough ride. You’ll also need decent tyres – we’ve all seen people sliding around on the wrong rubber, usually to the great mirth of onlookers.

A shooting vehicle often works hard in unforgiving conditions. This means the build-quality and components have to be up to the challenge. It also means you must be prepared for the odd ding, bump and scratch. My great-grandfather famously used his Rolls Royce to go everywhere, bumping it across the ploughed fields of his Norfolk estate without a thought for the paintwork, and that car was, shall we say, solidly built. You also have to be happy with the interior coming into contact with plenty of mud, dog hair, feathers, and goodness knows what else.

 

One thing you’ll notice about the types of cars mentioned above is that there’s no hatchbacks on the list. Gundog, gun(s), cartridge bag, slab, boots, coat, bottle for the host, flowers for the hostess, water for the dog... there’s ever such a lot of stuff you need when you set out for a day’s shooting. And some of it is best kept separate from some of the rest of it. “The dog drank your wine,” is not a phrase likely to endear you to your host as you hand his wife a chewed clump of stalks. You need a boot big enough for your dogs, boots and guns, with a door system that prevents the hounds from leaping out when you open it and buggering up the drive, plus somewhere you can keep things relatively mud-free.

Well, we think it does. Or at least, we think it will: the INEOS Grenadier is currently in development and due to hit the market in just over a year. While the Grenadier has been engineered as a working tool first, the looks are inspired by great off-roaders of the past, and you can see this in the functional styling. So it won’t look out of place on a rough-and-ready walk-one-stand-one day, but having been designed by someone used to doing super-yachts, we think it will hold its own, even among luxury car brand “supermodel” SUVs.

 

Being engineered from the ground up, and with vital components built by off-road specialists, there’s not many palces it won’t go and not much it can’t stand up to terrain-wise. A three-litre BMW engine, permanent 4WD and a bespoke transmission mean you’ll always have the power and torque, while tailor-made Bridgestone tires will supply the grip.

 

 

The Grenadier’s flat-bed boot is large enough to take a euro-pallet, and up to one tonne of weight, so there’s loads of room for a dog crate, plus all your clobber. What’s more, there’s a vertically-split tailgate, meaning you can open the small section to take out your gun without releasing the hounds. 

 

 

The unicor- sorry…the Grenadier is currently in the last stages of development, undergoing testing and tweaking, but will be available to buy in early 2022. Until then, if you think a Grenadier could fit the bill as your next shooting vehicle, you can stay up to date with all the latest news on it’s progress and get access to exclusive content and opportunities by raising your hand to express your interest.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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