Strange start to the Monaco Yacht Show – journalists were tempted to the Port Palace Hotel, overlooking all the yachts, to inspect cars. Edmiston, the brokers in red and masters of the art of marketing, were announcing the winner of a competition to pimp up a Range Rover so that it would better match it’s use as a land based tender for one’s superyacht.

As Nick Edmiston explained, he and his company have been charging around in these iconic wagons for years – here was an opportunity to come up with something different.

Jamie Edmiston, Nick’s son who heads up the London office and deals with all things branded, invited ‘the world’s top yacht designers’, as he put it, to submit their ideas. Tim Heywood, Andrew Winch, Terry Disdale, Martin Francis, Redman Whitely Dixon, Ken Freivokh and Dickie Bannenberg duly delivered and all lined up in Monaco to admire each other’s work.

The cars had to be practical, meet stringent road safety regulations and at the same time have that touch of marine styling which would say Yacht Rover rather than Land Rover. Despite being up to their eyes in the world’s top yacht projects all seven found time to deliver impressively detailed ideas.

A common denominator seemed to be teak – dashboards, bonnets, door panels and fascias all had the ubiquitous deck treatment but in the end the judges decided that Andrew Winch’s wagon was the winner with it’s white stainless steel finish. “It’s clean and pure, designed to move you from private jet to private yacht,” gushed Andrew and it even had a matching trailer for the inevitable luggage overflow?

But your author reckoned it looked a bit ordinary when the model was unveiled. Sorry Andrew. I thought Terry Disdale won it hands down with what he called his ‘St Tropez cruiser’ a beach buggy with bells on. And Terry was the only designer to have the balls to cut the roof off the thing. The picture here is Terry’s submission.

According to Edmiston all the cars can be built to order costing anything from Euros 200,000 to Euros 800,000. It was all good fun although as proceedings continued Edmiston senior was heard to say, “I wish Jamie would get on with this, I need to go out and sell some yachts?”