Getting my mother to do anything automotive was like pulling teeth. Outside of the occasional half-throttle blast onto the highway in her 1975 Olds Omega, she was trepidation personified behind the wheel, ever conscious about speeding, or doing anything that might influence her delinquent son further towards the world of cars (look how far that got her.) But every now and then, she’d do something that would shock the hell out of all of us. There was the one time she flung the Omega around like an angry drifter to avoid a Lincoln coming at her head-on, and managed to both spin the car and miss the ditches with no issue whatsoever to the sheer horror of her two teenaged sons in the back. Or the time she laid into a 406-powered Chevy stepside and walked the truck sideways half a block with the tires boiling while I left claw-marks on the dashboard. When I finally realized that I wasn’t going to die and asked her why the hell she did that, her response was just stunning: “That was fun! This thing’s got some nuts!” Keep in mind, this is the same woman who shifted the trans in my Impala from Drive to Reverse at about 40 mph when the inline-six stalled out, treating me to the sounds of a very tortured TH350.

This is Hilary Goy…Carfection reviewer Alex Goy’s mother. She’s a teacher, and she’s about to take a Range Rover out onto the trails for the first time ever. Scratch that…she’s about to go off-roading for the first time ever. Now, this isn’t the first time that her son has thrown her in as part of an experiment behind the wheel. Last time, he put her into a Ford Focus RS at Castle Coombe and introduced her to the Drift Mode button. She didn’t quite take to drifting so well…so how will she do wheeling around an expensive luxury SUV? Will she do just fine wading this thing through a muddy wash, or will she start swearing like a British Navy sailor being denied liberty on the hill descent course?