Clean thing ...

Gut Damp on the Baltic Sea - a place of tranquillity and free thought. No one would think of going off-road here. Well, there is the beach, which would be a nice challenge. But it's better not to go there because: Dog beach, because: Regulations. Friends, this is Germany!

But there is still Count Alexander zu Reventlow. Blond hair, three-day beard, blue eyes. He could also pass for a Red Bull athlete. He owns the Damp estate and therefore also a lot of land and forest around it in the region. He has also been living his private passion for the Grenadier since the very beginning; he drives the children to school on it in the morning - cross-country, of course. Now he just says: "Come along!"

The Grenadier is ready. Black Edition. It looks exactly how you would dream of a real off-roader. Angular, big, black. If there is such a thing as a standardised centre of what we call contemporary mobility, then the INEOS Grenadier is at the very edge. It is the one that defines the boundary. The automobile reaches right up to it. Then come lorries, tanks and aeroplanes.

We climb onto the seat. A cockpit worthy of the name. Switches and buttons like in a helicopter. That's exactly what it was modelled on. Everything is functional, immediately to hand, robust and easy to operate with work gloves. That was one of the specifications given by the founder Sir Jim Ratcliffe to Hans-Peter Pessler, COO at INEOS Automotive and therefore responsible for the project. Another was for the car to sound mechanical, pure and emotional. Ratcliffe wanted a pure and authentic vehicle. Not an SUV!

We turn off the road onto a dirt track towards the forest. It had rained heavily the days before, the ground is muddy and there are quite a few puddles. Hans-Peter Pessler personally instructs us from the passenger seat. He pulls the lever for the transmission to the right and then to the rear, presses a button on the ceiling, then says: "Now you can go. Full throttle straight away so that all the dirt is thrown out of the tyre tread and we get grip on this greasy surface. Then you drive through this section as consistently as possible. Don't play with the throttle so that the torque remains as constant as possible. There will be a little wobble and splash. I always press the knee of my right foot against the inside wall. That helps to keep the throttle constant. Okay?" - Okay. Or not?

The BMW in-line six-cylinder turbo engine with 286 hp and 450 Newton metres of torque is revving. The tyres spin when stationary. The front axle smears to the right, steering impulse to the left to get in line, the front axle skilfully ignores this! Pessler remains cool. So full throttle! Then the front end slowly but noticeably pulls to the left in the direction of travel, the Grenadier accelerates. Now constant throttle. The first puddle! It doesn't look that big from up here. As the Grenadier dives in, mud and water splashes across the windscreen. The windscreen wipers are doing a great job. It smears and smacks and we imagine it smokes a little too. Constantly accelerating, the next puddle, the grenadier dives in, another gush of mud and water, the windscreen wipers work, fountains spray metres high and metres to the side. We are defying nature! Our senses are on alert. It's euphoric.

We turn into the forest. "Down there," is all Pessler says. Okay. With a lot of imagination, you can find something like a path between the trees. The grenadier slowly makes his way through the forest. But then we stop. "What's going on," asks Pessler. Good question. I tell him that this looks like a dead end to me and whether I should perhaps turn round here and go back. Pessler points straight ahead with his arm, up the hill, between the stately trunks of deciduous trees, which is supposed to mean: that way! I can't think of anything more than: "Ah yes, when you can't see the path for the trees ...". Pessler instructs: "Keep slightly to the right here, then pull up to the left." - "And then constant throttle again?" Pessler nods. Then he casually mentions that we don't have the coarse studded tyres for hard off-road riding, but the road-optimised compromise version. "But that doesn't matter." So it does.

Pessler just says: "Let's go now."

The grenadier works its way forwards. I try to move the front end to the left to avoid the tree on the right, but the Grenadier pushes outwards, then I lift the throttle a little, a technical error ... but without consequences. The grenadier continues to work its way up the hill, then pulls to the left, just past the tree trunk. The nose rises steeply into the sky. Flying blind. The dirt track must be somewhere up ahead. The grenadier digs on with all fours. The snout drops down. There is the track. Turn hard to the left. You've made it! The grenadier is horizontal again and on course for the forest exit.

We get out and look at our work. The Grenadier looks like an abstract work of art. As if someone had spread a bucket of brown paint extensively and excessively over a black metal canvas and then wiped two windscreen wiper cut-outs into it. "That's how it should look," says Pessler. Pessler waves aside our comment that it should be cleaned again for the photos. "Absolutely not! A grenadier has to look like this!" We understand.

→ You can read the full interview in the current ramp #70 - Fair Enough!