WHY ONE OF ENGLAND’S RICHEST MEN SPENT $2 BILLION TO MAKE HIS DREAM CAR

I’m drifting off to sleep when I hear what sounds like a couple of African bush elephants headed straight for my tent. Hours earlier, when our group checked into our luxury camp on the banks of Botswana’s Okavango Delta, we were each handed an air horn for emergencies. Yes, this feels like an emergency.

After blasting the horn twice, I wait in the dark, suddenly worried that I’ve made a deadly mistake. Would the siren keep the elephants away, or provoke them? Soon a stranger climbs through the flaps of my tent, sidestepping the pair of lingering pachyderms. She tucks a blanket over me and hands me a half-empty Botswanan beer. Soon both the elephants and I are calm and ready to settle down for the night. (I learn the next morning that my beer-bearing visitor was not a vigilant camp hand but a gregarious bush pilot named Tammy, a fellow guest at Machaba Gomoti Camp.)

If the question is How did I get here? the answer is Sir Jim Ratcliffe, a billionaire British businessman I had never met, and his nearly $2 billion gamble on shepherding his dream car from an idea on a beer coaster into reality.

It all began with a love for safari. Ratcliffe, the founder of the London-based multinational chemical giant INEOS, has long enjoyed spending his holidays in Africa. And his favored vehicle for traversing rough terrain in the bush was the Land Rover Defender. When Land Rover said in 2016 that it was going to discontinue his favorite 4x4, Ratcliffe asked to buy the rights so that he could continue manufacturing the Defender himself.

The automaker said no.

But the INEOS chairman is not a man easily deterred. Bemoaning the loss of the legendary rough-and-tumble SUV, Ratcliffe declared to friends in late 2016 over a pint at the Grenadier that he would build his own off-roader—one that looked like the Defender but performed better. He called the undertaking Project Grenadier in honor of the two-hundred-year-old London pub where he made the vow.

Any number of automotive start-ups that have gone bust over the past several years can attest that creating a successful car company from the ground up these days is nearly impossible. But much like the original Land Rover Defender itself, Ratcliffe is no stranger to challenges.

He founded INEOS, originally an acronym for Inspec Ethylene Oxide and Specialties, in 1998, growing it into a ubiquitous polymers manufacturer that makes the baseline chemicals for almost every material you see or touch—from the plastics in which your food is packaged to the solvents composing your antibiotics. Two decades later, in celebration of the company’s china anniversary, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his contributions to business and investment. Not long before, he had been named the UK’s richest person, with an estimated net worth exceeding $25 billion.

“INEOS is probably the biggest company you’ve never heard of,” says Gregg Hughes, Ratcliffe’s longtime go-to safari guide, during our drive through Botswana’s bushveld one October afternoon. “Because it’s a private company, nobody knew who they were, so when the article naming him the wealthiest man in Britain was published, it was probably quite embarrassing for the British government. They must have thought, Well, we’d better knight him immediately.”

Ratcliffe still presides over the global conglomerate, which now employs more than 25,000 people across 173 sites in 29 countries. The INEOS empire has expanded beyond chemicals into, among other things, clothing: The company owns the British heritage brand Belstaff.

He’s also made splashy investments in the sports world. In 2020, INEOS became the principal partner of the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula 1 team, with one-third ownership. A year later, the company launched a partnership with the New Zealand All Blacks rugby team. It also sponsored INEOS Britannia, the sailing team that was the runner-up for the 2024 America’s Cup. And Ratcliffe’s company has a growing presence in professional soccer, with full ownership of a team in the Swiss league and a stake in a French club.

His most high-profile move in sports to date, however, has provided the billionaire with a taste of bad publicity. Last year, Ratcliffe spent more than $1.6 billion to purchase a 27.7 percent stake in Manchester United, one of the most successful teams in the history of British soccer and one of the world’s most valuable sports franchises. It also happens to be his boyhood club. As part of the deal, the existing owners handed Ratcliffe responsibility for overseeing operations. But his first full season in charge has not yet gone to plan. The club fired its manager in late October and was in the bottom half of the Premier League standings at Christmas for the first time in more than thirty years. Meanwhile, Ratcliffe caught some flack in the press for canceling the club’s staff holiday party and reducing holiday bonuses.

If any Man U fans are starting to doubt Ratcliffe’s resolve to achieve his goals, though, they might want to study how he built an automotive company from scratch, seeing opportunity where an established manufacturer was giving up. “He could not believe that Land Rover would walk away from the Defender,” Hughes says. (As it turns out, Land Rover had its own plans for the nameplate; it resurrected the Defender brand in 2020 with a softer, more suburban vibe.)

Ratcliffe did not tiptoe into car making. Since forming INEOS Automotive in 2017, he has shelled out some $2 billion for an all-star team and a class-leading manufacturing plant. He hired superyacht designer Toby Ecuyer to create the look of his new dream vehicle—a boxy silhouette that borrows from the Defender as well as the Mercedes-Benz G-Wagen—and enlisted G-Wagen engineering firm Magna Steyr. And through his Formula 1 contacts, he purchased a former Mercedes factory in Hambach, France, just over a hundred miles from Stuttgart, a world-class automotive hub with access to talent, manufacturing, and logistics.

Six years after the pint of lore, the first INEOS Grenadier rolled off the production line in late 2022, boasting unprecedented off-road chops built to tackle anything that the natural world can conceive. Well, almost anything—as Hughes and I will later learn.

Ratcliffe has thrived as an unlikely automaker, selling the Grenadier, for $75,000 and up, across the globe in spades to off-road enthusiasts. Land Rover sued over design similarities but lost because it had never trademarked the original Defender’s shape. Now INEOS Automotive is building a second model, the Quartermaster pickup truck, and says that it sees an eventual path to profitability.

I hadn’t heard of Ratcliffe when INEOS Automotive invited me last fall to drive the 4x4 on a safari through South Africa and Botswana. Nevertheless, I boarded a flight shortly after, flying fifteen hours from Atlanta to Johannesburg, followed by two more in a Cessna Caravan to Kruger National Park, South Africa’s largest wildlife reserve and the starting point for our seven-day, 1,200-mile trek behind the wheel of the Grenadier. It would be a journey that pushed me, and Ratcliffe’s dream car, to the limits.

Through the turboprop's tiny window, I see five pristine 4x4’s looming large next to the dusty airstrip. My five traveling companions—Philippe Steyer, the president of INEOS Automotive South Africa, and his partner, Aurélie, a French schoolteacher; Sue and John, a jolly New Zealand couple; and our photographer, Tony—hop into their SUVs. Meanwhile, I tentatively approach my own as though it were a wild beast, my jet-lagged brain first forgetting that the driver’s seat is on the right and then, once I pull open the ponderous door and jump up into the driver’s seat, struggling to make sense of the array of buttons, switches, and toggles before me.

But there’s no time to figure it out. Hughes is leading the caravan to Pafuri Camp, a luxury lodge on the banks of the Luvuvhu River, and I fall into line, soon realizing I’m behind the wheel of the most ferocious SUV I’ve encountered in my career as an automotive journalist.

Hughes designed the itinerary to match the Grenadier’s capabilities. “Tomorrow is sand first, then tar, and then water,” he explains once we arrive at camp, a node of wooden walkways leading to a smattering of tented suites along the crocodile-infested river. After the pep talk, I head to the bush bar and ask the bartender for my local favorite, a double Six Dogs Blue gin neat, and relax on a lounger by the watering hole in contemplation of the next day.

I awake at 5:00 A.M. the next morning, ready for a seven-hour journey that will cover just 164 miles. We ascend the Soutpansberg Mountains in the Tuli Block, a narrow fringe of game farms where South Africa, Botswana, and Zimbabwe meet. After a bush breakfast in an overlook high above the Lanner Gorge, we make our way out of Kruger National Park.

Massive dust clouds begin to obscure the potholes, embankments, and wayward rocks in our path. I feel like Iron Man in his armored exoskeleton as the Grenadier squishes the obstacles with such nonchalance that it feels like rolling a military tank over a small car (another adventure I once undertook in the name of work).

Exiting the park, our caravan glides across paved roads for the next hour. Rare is the purpose-built off-roader that you’d want to drive on asphalt. That’s because the robust 4x4’s that make short work of jagged surfaces tend to shake, rattle, or roll in basic driving conditions. But the Grenadier owes its smooth ride to a pair of hefty beam axles and a set of old-fashioned coil springs.

The switchboard in front of me activates features to handle different types of driving, such as hill-descent control, “wading,” and “off-road” modes. Its three differential locks distribute power to all four wheels in particularly tricky situations. Hughes reminds us via walkie-talkie when to shift between high and low range. (High range for highway driving and low range once the pavement gives way to corrugated dirt as we near the Pont Drift border crossing into Botswana on the Limpopo River.)

For an American, driving on the left side of the road with the steering wheel on the right is always a cognitive adjustment. Add to that a gear shift so intractable that my left arm alone can’t unlock it to switch between low and high range. I quickly discover that I need to remove my hands from the wheel and use both of them to nudge the gears.

But slowly, I attune to the Grenadier and its proportions. The canvas-clad cab is deceptively comfortable, and I feel ready to spend fifty hours behind the wheel over the next week.

Just before sunset, we arrive at the Mashatu Game Reserve’s Tuli Safari Lodge, where the employees have names like Surprise, Advice, and Socks. The bartender’s name is Request, so I ask for a Six Dogs and enjoy the last vestiges of WiFi before we head deeper into the bush.

Over the next couple of days, we clock animal sightings between challenging terrain and long stretches steering the Grenadier’s oversize body-on-frame construction, with its massive ladder chassis and solid axles, along well-paved roads.

The SUV owes its performance to its specially designed rolling chassis, with every component chosen “on purpose,” says Steyer, who worked at Mercedes-Benz for nearly two decades before joining the newly formed INEOS Automotive. In his last post at the Mercedes plant near Tuscaloosa, Alabama, he was in charge of operations for the global production of the automaker’s largest SUVs.

“The engine, gearbox, transfer case, diff locks—it’s not one thing,” he tells me. “It’s a combination of all those factors that makes the vehicle extremely, extremely capable.”

The Grenadier sports respectable street cred, pairing a 3.0-liter six-cylinder engine from BMW with an eight-speed ZF gearbox. (Ratcliffe sourced the powertrain prior to forming the F1 partnership with Mercedes.) But the secret sauce, according to Steyer, is that its engineers limited its horsepower so that the torque available is “massive” relative to the engine’s revolutions per minute. The calculus empowers the Grenadier to trounce over boulders, branches, and other obstacles with composure. Combined with its solid chassis and multilink independent suspension, the Grenadier has quickly become the ultimate new standard in rough-terrain vehicles.

When we reach the sand and powder sections getting into northeast Botswana, the bumpy, tree-ridden terrain makes me feel as though I am glade skiing. But instead of skis, I am operating an SUV, and instead of snow clouds, I squint through sand clouds. Any other SUV would have gotten stuck several times along the way, but the Grenadier is not bothered by an extended romp in the sand.

We are heading toward what Hughes describes as the highlight of the trip: the Makgadikgadi Pans, a stunning expanse of salt and mud visible from outer space that is one of the world’s largest salt flats. Here we must be self-sufficient. There are no signs or paved roads, and the heat is extreme. We drive for hours along the pan, which is fringed by grasslands and palm trees, eventually arriving at the mysterious Kubu Island, where a fly camp has been set up for us.

On Kubu, a dry granite rock rising out of the plains said to look like a hippo’s back (kubu means “hippopotamus” in Setswana), there is no phone signal, no Internet connection, no running water, no electricity, and certainly no bathrooms. Two people explain to me in detail how to use the pit latrine, but I decide instead to limit my water intake for our thirty-six-hour stay (and pee later in more favorable conditions).

The next day, we decide to travel caravan-style over the pans to get a better look. Majestic and otherworldly enough to seem like the surface of a distant planet, the earth’s white crust extends for hundreds of miles, baked in the dry season’s unforgiving sun. It is easily the most splendid vision I’ve ever beheld.

But just beneath, the terra firma is deceptively soft. The thick salt crust conceals a fine silt that turns into mud during the rainy season. The salt dries during the long, rainless winter, but the mud underneath does not. If you drive over it with a heavy vehicle that breaks through the top layer, you are essentially trapped in quicksand.

The guidebooks warn that the crust can crack, creating deep fissures that trap vehicles in the mud. “Never venture onto the pans unless you’re absolutely sure the salty surface and the clay beneath are dry,” according to Lonely Planet. “When underlying clay becomes saturated, vehicles can break through the crust and become irretrievably bogged.”

Hughes and I drive together, leading the pack as he tells me about the local history. A Cape Town native, Hughes began his career at Mala Mala, one of South Africa’s largest game reserves, before opening his own safari consultancy, Safari Footprints, to arrange bespoke trips for wealthy travelers. After years of showing Ratcliffe around the region, he was asked to head Six Rivers Africa, a nonprofit conservation initiative under the aegis of Ratcliffe’s Six Rivers Foundation, which works with local communities to preserve biodiversity.

“The original people of Botswana were hunter-gatherers,” he says. “They would have used this as a spiritual ground for burials, celebrations...”

Suddenly the walkie-talkie in the cupholder crackles, interrupting Hughes’s history lesson with an important message: For the first time all week, a car in our caravan has gotten stuck. Then another. And another. One by one, each of the cars behind us has become mired in our muddy tracks.

We circle back to help our group extract their 4x4’s from the mud, but—in a moment prompting wide-eyed panic—Hughes and I get stuck, too. Until now, the Grenadier has been unfazed by any obstacle under its wheels, but it turns out that the superstar SUV can’t quite do it all. Hughes is surprised that we didn’t cruise right over the pans. Even despite all the warnings? “You are never certain in the pans,” he admits. “Everyone gets stuck at some time.”

After two hours of toil with shovels and rope tows in the triple-digit heat, a car is freed. Steyer drives it back to base to pick up six local camp hands who unearth the rest of our fleet using the same blueprint and elbow grease. The rest of us lumber toward camp like a pack of sweaty, dehydrated zombies becoming slap-happier with each step. We traipse for two hours under the punishing sun toward our refuge, which taunts us from miles away like a rocky mirage rising from the plains. The humbling group bonding experience renders the New Zealanders only slightly less jolly but still grinning.

We leave camp the next morning, wearing the dazed yet grateful visage of war comrades. We are on the safari’s final stretch, crossing the deep sands of the Kalahari Desert—again, no match for the Grenadier, especially compared with yesterday’s muddy entrapment—on our way into Maun, a city that serves as the gateway for trips into the mighty Okavango Delta, teeming with wildlife. After refueling, we cross several bridges over the delta’s bloom of waterways. The SUVs, pushed to their limits just yesterday, perform heroically.

One by one, the five Grenadiers cross a side channel off the Gomoti River in the delta’s southeastern corner. Each noses its way into the water, which measures roughly thirty-nine inches at its deepest point, with a satisfying splash and emerges triumphantly at the other side. The group cheers for every crossing.

The morning after the elephant incident at my tent at Machaba Gomoti Camp, we depart on a game drive, observing the animals of the Okavango Delta congregating around the dwindling watering holes as they await the rainy season. Hughes points to a rare tableau: a leopard cub carting a freshly killed baboon, equivalent in size, to feast upon it beneath a jackalberry tree.

We inch closer. She stops to eye us. Leopards rarely kill baboons in an open floodplain in the daytime, explains Hughes. They normally strike at night to avoid predators. “She’s a bit shy, but she’s bloody hungry,” he says. “I’ve never seen that before.”

We leave her to eat in private, as the landscape rolls past. A flock of blue rollers fight over a nesting hole next to a pair of giraffes that look the other way. Three hippos bathe in the river, while a sounder of warthogs trots across the savanna, oblivious to the pride of lions waiting nearby.

It’s time for a coffee break. We sip coffee spiked with Amarula and watch in the mid-distance a dazzle of zebras, Botswana’s national animal, tiptoe across the plains like an optical illusion. It’s just another Saturday morning in the Okavango Delta, brought to us by Sir Jim Ratcliffe and his $2 billion bet.

2025-02-14T11:14:28Z