If you like cars, then chances are you probably like tanks. And if you like tanks, chances are you’d probably like to spend a Saturday afternoon driving some tanks around a muddy field and then using a tank to drive over a car…
The good people at MoneySupermarket.com are running a campaign to “crush car insurance quotes”, and to celebrate they are wantonly crushing actual cars. Matt from Speedmonkey used a monster truck to flatten a pair of vehicles, Adam from Carwitter and Yours Truly from The Car Expert crushed some worn-out French hatchbacks with tanks, and – if you’re quick – you can get in on the action by crushing a car with a giant robot hand. More on that in a bit, but I’ve tried it and it’s hilarious.
And so it was that I journeyed up to Northamptonshire to charge around some muddy paddocks in a selection of incredible military material, culminating in the crushing a sad little Citroën with a mighty Chieftan battle tank.
The beginner tank
To start things off, I am dropped into the cramped cockpit of a 432 armoured personnel carrier. The first and most obvious point is that there’s no steering wheel – you steer by pulling on two levers to control the speed of the tracks on either side of the tank. Pull back on the left lever and the left tracks slow down, pivoting the tank to the left. Pull back on the right lever, you get the idea. You don’t use the brake pedal unless it’s a proper emergency or you’d like a head injury (they’re not soft and squishy cabins).
Instructions over, we start bashing about the paddock. Naturally this was not a racing situation and in no way were there any lap time comparisons between myself and Adam from Carwitter. If there were, he would probably have been about 11 seconds slower than me over a 5-minute lap. Possibly. Who knows?
If you think that your Land Rover Defender or Toyota Land Cruiser is the epitome of off-road capability, you are sadly mistaken. A tank is about the most driving fun you can have in a muddy field. Although to be fair, it would not be that useful for dropping off Tarquin and Penelope at prep school, so Land Rover can breathe a sigh of relief.
But the 432 is simply the entry-level tank on this epic adventure. Adam gets to have a crack in a Russian TS2 Gvozdika tank, which can swim and launch itself up gradients that you couldn’t possibly walk up. Its huge gun can also hit a target the size of a tennis court from a range of 17 miles, but we weren’t allowed to test that capability for some reason.
Incidentally, these ex-Soviet tanks are the same as the ones currently being used by Islamic State forces in the Middle East, so British Army attack helicopters undertake regular target practice on this very farm against these very vehicles. Er, hopefully not today…
The fast tank
Meanwhile, my next weapon is the British CET (Combat Engineer Tractor). These were designed to take on the Russians if they invaded West Germany during that whole Cold War thing. The CET is formidable, even by tank standards. Capable of withstanding a nuclear attack, it can travel at up to 55mph in pretty much any terrain you like, and cost £30 million when new. The model I was driving had been purchased by the boys at Tanks-a-Lot with merely 20 (non-combat) hours on the clock, and they paid a grand total of £7,000. So in only 20 hours of peacetime driving, the tank had depreciated by £29,993,000. That’s your taxes at work, people of Britain!
The CET is a real monster, but is surprisingly easy to handle. It has a tiller to steer (because it’s amphibious as well), and you simply put your right foot to the floor and go. Flat out, everywhere. Until it overheats and breaks down in the middle of a ditch, but I swear that wasn’t my fault. At least that’s one thing they have in common with a Land Rover.
The big tank
Finally, we come to the culmination of a hard day’s work – the car crushing. Adam goes first, launching his Russian Gvozdika over a puny Renault in an explosion of crunching and screeching metal. He looks very pleased with himself; the Renault looks less content with proceedings. And now I get to meet the monster that I will be driving over a hapless Citroën. It’s a 55-tonne Chieftain, the main battle tank of the British Army for over 30 years. It’s a behemoth, towering over all of the other 100+ military vehicles scattered around the premises. And I’m going to crush a car with it.
You would think that driving over the top of a car would be terrifying, but in a Chieftain tank it’s kind of like driving over a speed hump. Although speed humps don’t usually sound like a drawn-out car crash, and they’re not laugh-out-loud hilarious like driving a tank over a car is. You really should give it a go.
Stuart crushed a car with a tank courtesy of MoneySupermarket.com
