Meet Team Broke: Land Rover Off-Road Racing
Two home-built V8 racers, one family legacy and a shared obsession with off-road motorsport.
-
If you’ve ever wondered what Team Broke actually means, it’s simple: either we’re broke, or the car is.
Team Broke is Adam and Jess, and we have a slightly unhealthy obsession with off-road motorsport. We compete in both Comp Safaris and CCV trials. Between the two of us, we do everything ourselves: driving, spannering, preparing the cars, fixing them when they inevitably break, and then doing it all again.
But Team Broke actually started long before we did.
Where it all started
Adam’s parents, Karen and Giles, were racing around 20 years ago. They were the original Team Broke, competing in a Land Rover-based car—though theirs was much more old-school, with carburettors and the usual kit of the time.
They introduced Adam to off-road motorsport, and Adam eventually introduced Jess to it too. Before we started racing, we competed in CCV trials together, and it didn’t take long for us to be completely hooked.
In December 2022, we bought our Comp Safari car.
At the time, it was red, had no engine or gearbox, and needed a serious amount of TLC.
We knew we wanted something Land Rover-based, but we also wanted to make it our own—and we definitely did. We spent the next couple of years building it in an old cow shed.
When we look at what eventually came out of that shed, we’re both incredibly proud of it.
The 88-inch Comper
Our racer is an 88-inch Comp Safari car built around a Range Rover Classic chassis. Under the skin, it’s a bit of everything: a Discovery 1 front axle, a Defender 110 rear axle, and, at its heart, a 4.2-litre Jaguar AJV8 producing around 300 bhp.
The engine is paired with a Discovery 3 manual gearbox. Getting that combination to work wasn’t easy. The car spent several days on a rolling road, with more than a few midnight shifts in the workshop along the way.
At the time, no one else was running this engine-and-gearbox combination in an 88-inch ALRC Comp Safari car. That’s probably the part of the build we’re most proud of.
Almost everything has changed since we bought it. Aside from the chassis and roll cage, the fuel tank is probably the only original part left. It certainly doesn’t resemble the red car we brought home in 2022.
Two cars… and yes, they’re both blue
We have two competition cars. Our Comp Safari car is the 88-inch racer, and alongside it we have an 80-inch ALRC trials car powered by an old-school Rover 3.9 V8.
We painted them both blue because, well… we like blue! It does mean people regularly think we only have one car. Apparently, making two cars look almost identical isn’t the best way to show that you own two.
Only the Comp Safari car runs number 67. Despite what people might think, we didn’t choose it to be down with the kids.
It was Giles’ original racing number, and we still use his original number boards today. Whenever Adam lines up in car 67, he’s carrying on something that started with his dad more than 20 years ago.
It’s a family thing
Although Team Broke is mainly Adam and Jess, we have some amazing people around us who make it all possible.
Giles is still heavily involved and joins us as part of the pit crew at as many events as he can. He helped throughout the build, and the car genuinely wouldn’t be where it is today without him. He’s even had a ride in it a couple of times!
It’s pretty special to have gone from Giles and Karen racing all those years ago to Adam and Jess racing today, with Giles still helping from the other side of the pits.
Working on the cars together is honestly one of our favourite parts of the hobby—most of the time. Like any couple, there are days in the workshop when we end up in complete silence over something entirely stupid.
But there’s nothing quite like sitting on the start line after finishing a major job on the car. Knowing how much work went into getting it there makes racing feel even better. Sometimes the ratio of fixing to racing seems a little off, but that’s all part of it.
The tyres
We’ve always run Insa Turbo tyres on both cars. The trials car uses Insa Turbo Special Track MT tyres while the Comp Safari car runs either Insa Turbo Sahara MTs or Insa Turbo Rangers when mud-terrain tyres aren’t permitted at a particular site.
We certainly put them through their paces. They get no mercy from us. If we get a puncture, we’re not necessarily pulling over to save the tyre—we’re probably carrying on and destroying it anyway!
They’ve always performed faultlessly for us. We’ve never had an issue with grip, and they look the part on the cars, too.
Sometimes they have too much grip. If we roll the car, we prefer to blame the tyres rather than admit it might have been a slight lack of talent on our part. That seems like a perfectly reasonable excuse.
Why do we do it?
Many people our age don’t understand why we’d rather spend a Saturday night working on a car in a cold cow shed than go to the pub—or why we’d happily spend a random weekend in May sitting in a muddy field.
For us, there’s nowhere else we’d rather be. We’d probably go mad without racing.
There’s something incredibly satisfying about repairing what you’ve broken, getting the car back together, and then actually racing it. Sitting on the start line after a major repair is hard to beat.
You break it, you fix it, you race it—and then you probably break it again.
That’s off-road motorsport.
Why Team Broke?
The name originally belonged to Adam’s parents’ race team, so when we started competing, it felt only right to carry it on. To be honest, it still suits us perfectly.
Racing isn’t exactly the cheapest hobby, and we spend almost all our money on it. Some people tell us we should stop racing and save for a house, but our argument is simple:
You can sleep in a car. You can’t race a house.
Some days, we wonder whether we should have taken up golf instead. Then we go racing and remember exactly why we do it.
What’s next?
For now, we want to keep racing, improving and enjoying it. Hopefully, one day we’ll be a little less broke—but we never want to lose the fun that got us into the sport in the first place.
There are still a few ambitions on the bucket list. We’d love to take the Comp Safari car to the Off-Road Arena at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, and we’d absolutely love to see the Baja in action.
Until then, we’ll carry on doing what we do: building cars in cow sheds, spending money we probably shouldn’t, getting muddy, breaking things, fixing them and—hopefully—racing in between.
Team Broke in five words?
Expensive. Idiots. Fun. Muddy. Loud.
And we wouldn’t change it for the world.
