A SPORTY DISCOVERY; LR3 variant aims at Porsche Cayenne and BMW X5.(News)

Byline: JULIAN RENDELL

"Understatement'' ought to be the first word in a car company test engineer's lexicon. "It's pretty much sorting itself out,'' says Mike Cross, Land Rover's chief test engineer, as he calmly zips through another high-speed cornering maneuver.

He threads the Range Rover Sport through a tight, double-S bend, and there's no hint of strain in Cross' voice. This is surprising, because the bend happens to have a coefficient of friction close to that of fresh snow. And the Range Rover Sport corners practically on its door handles. Mind you, Cross' day job is to hone Jaguar's metal on the Nurburgring strop, so he is well prepared for this Land Rover demo.

From the passenger seat it is easy to feel the Sport grip and hold its line, despite Cross' best effort to cross it up and provoke a tail wag as he snaps the throttle shut. Another lap of the handling circuit and he hits the throttle to push the nose into understeer before a gentle transition to neutral. "Best-handling Land Rover in the range now,'' he says.

This super-slippery surface is part of the MIRA test circuit, a private facility an hour's drive from Land Rover's Gaydon technical center in the heart of England. It's a racetrack-oriented demonstration and not a place where you would expect a Land Rover to be tested. Not far away are the meandering lanes and neat hedgerows of Shakespeare country. Land Rover usually prefers these waterlogged, local paddocks to display its prodigious off-road strengths in the best light.

But the new Range Rover Sport, which makes its world debut at the Detroit show, is a new animal, indeed. It is the first additional model to wear the Range Rover badge, a production version loosely based on the Range Stormer model that took the show circuit by storm last year. The Sport is focused on high-quality road-driving more than mud-plugging, in a Land Rover bid to steal customers from BMW, Lexus, Porsche and Volkswagen, whose successes have proven that sport is as important as utility in an SUV.

Understanding that, it might come as a surprise to learn the Sport is a short-chassis variant of the new LR3, whose integrated ladder frame is a tough-as-nails underbody not associated with tight-handling SUVs. However, based on this limited demo the Sport belies its underpinnings; from the passenger seat the Sport feels like a well-sorted front-drive hatchback, though a tall and hefty one. Still, the essentials are here-plenty of front-end grip, strong turn-in and neutral cornering balance.