IT LOOKED like an old Austin Maestro van the boy racers had been tinkering with.

Higher off the ground with larger wings and wheelspats it was the sort of thing you would just not park beside in the supermarket.

Yet this was a most significant vehicle in automotive development and one I have waited to drive for years, being the chassis and driveline testbed that the successful Land Rover Freelander.

It was one of those famously covert vehicles of decades past with the advanced Freelander running gear cloaked as the sort of van nobody would spare a second glance at on its test runs around the midlands.

It all came about after market research by the Rover Group in the late 1980s suggested that Land Rover could enter the compact SUV market segment.

In the early 1990s, the Rover Group had a restricted product development budget and needed a partner to develop the project, which was codenamed CB40 after Canley Building 40, where the concept was initially developed.

The problem was that Rover's then-partner Honda declined and chose to develop its own CR-V model that was eventually launched in 1997.

So Rover decided to have a go on its own and utilised existing parts and components, as it had done with the MGF roadster.

Then, in 1994 BMW took control of Rover and the project received the much needed capital it required to progress.

The element of secrecy around the project involved a lot of camouflage and nobody could really guess the secret that lurked inside the old Maestro's drab bodyshell.

With painstaking work, the testbed demonstrated that the Freelander had all the elements that would fuel the burgeoning compact sports utility market.

The Freelander had an ace up its sleeve because the Land Rover DNA in its specification endowed it with prodigious off road capabilities.

I know as I have driven the Freelander in its various forms in some seriously scary off road situations, not the least of which is the Land Rover proving ground at Eastnor Castle in Herefordshire where much of the development work took place.

Eastnor has had links with Land Rover for 50 years and what better place to drive such a historic vehicle.

The brakes were on over the more extreme parts of the course where I had just tried the latest Range Rover but I was directed to a more forgiving circuit of the 500 acre estate near Ledbury, home of the Hervey-Bathurst family.

Eastnor played a major role in developing technologies - such as Anti-lock Brakes, Adjustable Air Suspension, Electronic Traction Control, Hill Descent Control and Terrain Response - many of which were world firsts in the 4x4 sector.

So out in the rough the CB40 testbed proved that while it may not have been a true Maestro on the streets it certainly lived up to its name when the Tarmac was left in the rear view mirror.

The 1,796cc engine endowed it with a lot of punch and the lightweight bodywork adjusted the power -to-weight ratio to an extent in which acceleration was quite amazing, despite it age.

Nimble and nippy it certainly posed the question, why didn't they market it. There was certainly no van on the road at the time that could hold a candle to it.

There were 22 CB40s built, all in black and the one I drove was prototype No 9 - a brake test example.

The CB40 ‘mules' were known as the Mad Max vans, after the film.

This patricular vehicle is currently part of the Dunsfold Collection in Surrey - one of the largest private collections of Land Rovers in the world.