Full review

Bailey’s new, smallest, lightest, cheapest tourer range comes with a respected pedigree. The Pursuit range replaces both Olympus and Orion; some of the Pursuit models are based on the Olympus range’s best sellers; others on Orions. The Pursuit 400-2 closely resembles the Orion 400-2 in layout. It’s slightly cheaper than the Orion’s £13,190 price tag. And it has a visual impact shared with no other Bailey range; Pursuits have metallic grey sides. And beneath the eye-catching grey paintwork is a feature designed to help keep your Pursuit pristine; the sides have a glass-reinforced plastic outer skin, which is designed to provide enhanced resistance to dents, notably hailstorm damage.

With a weight of 1090kg, the 400-2 is suitable for a wide range of smaller vehicles. It’s a real get-up-and-tow caravan; perhaps the smallest in the Pursuit range best epitomises the reason for the choice of the name Pursuit. It’s a departure from the mythical winged horse and one-horned beast range names, in favour of a name that’s designed to link to caravanners buying a tourer specifically to follow their outdoor pursuits, be they surfing, cycling, walking…
 

Bailey gives Pursuit buyers an option. You can buy a Premium Pack of additional equipment for £399. This Premium Pack gives you a hitch-head stabiliser, a floor-mounted steel spare wheel, a door flyscreen, an 800-watt microwave oven and a radio/CD player with iPod and MP3 connection point.
You can also order your Pursuit with an opening sunroof, for an extra £356; the AL-KO ATC stability control system for £399 and an AL-KO Secure wheel lock for an extra £194. You may want all of those, or none of them; if you want your 400-2 to be kept simple and basic, and as low as possible in price, you can – and that’s the way our review example was supplied.
The 400-2’s layout is a classic one, with a kitchen on the offside, a dresser opposite, and a full-width rear shower room.

Showering

The shower is almost square, at 80cm x 70cm. The floor area is somewhat triangular, giving you a depth of 1.2 metres in the area of the toilet and wardrobe; even though this is a small caravan, its shower room is large enough to be called a dressing room, too. The washbasin is larger than you might expect in a diminutive caravan, at 30cm x 28cm. And the wardrobe, in the offside corner, gives you a hanging width of 48cm, with enough depth to hang long coats, plus two shelf spaces, one 27cm deep and the top one 40cm deep, curving with the shape of the caravan to slightly less than that.

Sleeping

We wondered if the foam-filled upholstery would be as comfortable as sprung seating when it comes to turning them into beds. So we lay down (not for long, you understand; we were working!) to assess it. These single beds feel firm but not too firm. The offside bed is 1.98m long; the nearside one is 1.88cm. Admittedly, we took those measurements right to the front panel, where the armrest and your pillows would take up 20cm, but our measurements illustrate that the 400-2’s single beds are long enough for the majority of prospective purchasers. When we made up the double bed, we found it relatively easy to handle the seat bases. Even though they’re long, they’re not particularly heavy to swing around so that the knee rolls faced the outer edges, to make up as flat a mattress as possible.

Storage

The six lockers along the sides of the lounge, plus the smaller lockers across the front, would provide ample stowage space for the small items two people would need. Even though there are no drop-down hatches to the under-settee storage space, and no spring hinges, lifting and holding up the slatted bases isn’t hard work. You’d stuff most of the duvet and pillow paraphernalia under the nearside bed because the offside settee locker is occupied by the Truma Combi boiler (2kW on gas and 1.8kW on electricity) – and by the freestanding table…

Dining

There’s a small table to hinge up at the front, just large enough for a couple of plates for a quick lunch. But when it comes to dinner time you’d want a table larger than this one (it’s 50cm wide and 34cm deep). At this point you need to remove the backrest of the offside settee and raise the seat unit upright against the wall while you hold the slatted base up to get the table out. To do this you have to get someone to hold the base up because getting the table out is a two-handed task. As our photographer was working in another Pursuit at this point in our analysis I decided to find a solo way of getting the table out. I did; by standing with one foot between the heater unit and the table, so that I could support the seat base upright with one knee… Where there’s a will there’s a way but it’s not always perfect or easy!

Lounge

The foam-filled upholstery feels fine in lounge mode just as it had done when we analysed it in bed mode.
The place for your TV is on the dresser on the nearside, where there are appropriate sockets.  
    

Kitchen

You will need to use the hinged extension on the fore end of the kitchen all the time when you’re making meals; it creates 30cm x 40cm of space. There are two mains sockets in the kitchen and enough space for an electric kettle alongside the tap. If you want to use a toaster, the hinged extension is the place for it. And if you run out of kitchen surface space you can use the dresser opposite.
One quick glance at the kitchen would have you thinking there was no lower cabinet storage. More detailed analysis, though, reveals quite the opposite. Below the combined oven-grill is a good-sized cutlery drawer and a 22cm-wide cupboard; although there are gas taps and heating ducting in here, there is usable space. But the real cabinet interest is opposite. The aft side of the dresser houses a three-shelf cabinet that measures roughly 60cm wide and 40cm across. Although it’s designed with a corner cut-off to create corridor space by the door, this is a sensibly-sized cabinet.
And the rest of the under-dresser area? That’s accessed outside; it’s the housing for your gas bottles. It’s designed for one 6kg propane bottle and a (spare) 3kg bottle in front of it.

Towing

Our test example, without the Premium Pack, had no hitch-head stabiliser. We think buyers of new caravans have become accustomed to finding these arriving on their purchases, and believe that most buyers of 400-2s will chose the Premium Pack to get that additional safety margin. But it’s good to have the option.
On tow? Our mighty Sorento looked – err, wrong attached to the little 400, but that’s the car we have and that’s therefore what we used. Hardly fair, you might say. But nonetheless our tow demonstrated that the caravan has natural good stability and brilliant short-caravan characteristics on cornering!
When it came to putting it back on its pitch, we pushed it manually, just to prove to ourselves that it’s so easy!