A ‘dune buggy’ built for the SAS
What vehicle offers the most fun for £45,000? Mark Dixon reckons this ex-SAS ‘dune buggy’ would be very hard to beat – and you could even use it to do the weekly shop, too
Photographer Matthew Howell and I can’t stop grinning. We’ve done dozens of magazine features together and I honestly cannot recall a vehicle that has caught our imagination so much. Neither of us can believe that this Mad Max-style dune buggy – still for sale at the time of writing – hasn’t been snapped up by a collector who appreciates its fascinating history and its massive fun factor.
I say ‘fun’, but this machine was built with a very serious purpose. Developed in the 1980s by British company Longline, a company later subsumed into engineering colossus Ricardo (the people who build engines for McLaren), the Light Strike Vehicle was intended as a fast and agile military reconnaissance vehicle. It was rushed into production ahead of the 1991 Gulf War and trialled by the SAS, but never saw much action and was quietly dropped from the British Army soon afterwards.
To help understand why, I’ve enlisted former Special Forces Captain David Blakeley. I met David when we were both part of the Jaguar ‘works’ team during the 2014 Mille Miglia and I know he’s a keen car guy. More relevantly for this story, he was a Commander in the British Special Forces ‘Pathfinder’ squadron, an elite unit that specialised in raids behind enemy lines for covert operations. He’s written a couple of books about his experiences,
Pathfinder and Maverick One, both of them engrossing reads without being overly sensationalist.
David has just had his first drive in the LSV and his smile is as wide as mine or Matt’s. ‘It’s super-cool! Just brilliant fun. If you had the cash, why would you not have one of these in your collection? But already I think I can tell why it wasn’t taken up long-term by Special Forces…’
We’ll come on to that in a moment. Not surprisingly, there isn’t a lot of information in the public domain about the LSV, but fortunately this example comes with a workshop manual – yes, really – and some MoD paperwork that probably shouldn’t have got beyond a Quartermaster’s desk. It reveals that this is a Cobra Mk3 (the Cobra name seems to have been adopted late in the programme), powered by a rear-mounted 1.6-litre Volkswagen Golf turbodiesel.
The engine is mated to a VW Syncro four-wheel drive system, which uses a central viscous coupling that locks-up when there’s too great a discrepancy between front and rear wheel speeds, and there are vacuum-operated diff locks for front and rear axles, too. The gearbox is a five-speeder, with a ‘crawler’ bottom gear and four conventional ratios above that.
The LSV was a rush job, contracted out to Sussex-based Longline by the MoD in the build-up to the first Gulf War. It rapidly evolved through three versions, and it’s reputed that just five examples were built of each. All were sent to the Gulf for testing by the SAS, but none is known to have seen any serious action other than, as the owner of this one puts it, ‘being ragged around the desert’.
The late-80s origins of the LSV are given away by a specification sheet that shows it was designed to take a 1.9-litre VW flat-four petrol engine, as used in the Type 25 van. That produced a measly 68bhp, which might sound adequate for such a light vehicle, until you remember how much kit Special Forces soldiers have to carry. Not just fuel and water, but ammunition – and lots of it. ‘A machine gun needs thousands of rounds of ammunition,’ points out David Blakeley, ‘and each round weighs about as much as an iPhone.’ This Mk3 therefore has a 1.6-litre turbodiesel; not only torquier, but also running on the same fuel that’s used by the vast majority of military vehicles.
‘In terms of acceleration and response, this feels a lot quicker than a Land Rover Defender,’ reckons David; ‘especially one that’s loaded with all the kit needed for desert warfare. But realistically it’s a two-person vehicle. You might get three people on board but that would be a squeeze, especially when they’re equipped with at least three levels of weaponry – pistols, grenades and a light machine gun.’
Talking of which, the original Longline spec sheet lists a variety of weapons options sufficient to moisten the crotch of any gun fanatic – GPMG (General Purpose Machine Gun), Mk19 40mm, Asp 30mm, Browning 0.50, Milan anti-tank missile, Gecal 50 and Giat 20mm, any of which could be mounted above the passenger space. There are large stowage bays either side, covered with welded mesh on their outer faces, which today would be ideal for holding your shopping bags on the weekly supermarket run – because this is a genuinely usable vehicle.
Don’t believe me? Let’s prove it. Access couldn’t be easier: you step over the steel-panelled, tubular frame sides and drop into the driver’s seat. Special Forces guys tend to be small and wiry (David is an exception) so it’s a relief to discover that the bucket seat is adjustable on its runners. The LSV has decent ground clearance
‘You might get three people on board but that would be a squeeze when theY’re equipped with pistols, grenades and a light machine gun’
beneath its flat composite floorpan but you still feel incredibly low-slung and exposed to the elements. ‘Although there’s zero protection, the all-round visibility is some compensation,’ David comments as I buckle up. ‘It’s one reason why I’m not keen on Humvees; you can’t see out of them that much.’ If you want to be really hardcore and just manage with goggles, the flat windscreen panel simply unbolts and lifts out. I’m not sure the chrome-rimmed gauges for coolant temperature and oil pressure are the originals but otherwise it all looks pretty much as it must have when delivered to 22 SAS Regiment on the cusp of the 1990-91 Gulf War.
Strictly speaking, with a diesel engine of this vintage, you should wait for the glow-plug light to extinguish before turning the starter, but what adrenaline-hyped trooper is going to do that, when rounds are incoming and things are starting to get a bit hairy? A sticker on the dash simply says ‘Switch ignition on. Press starter button until engine starts (max 15 secs)’, and in practice the Golf turbodiesel fires up straight away. It’s pretty much hanging out in the open air behind you and its diesel throb isn’t exactly melodious, but its no-nonsense beat suits the macho character of the vehicle well.
Slot the gearlever into first – the ’change has a race-car metal-on-metal feel, pulling a long selector rod linked to the rear transaxle – and press the throttle. At first, the LSV feels disappointingly sluggish… until you realise that there’s a lot of lost pedal motion to start with (deliberately built-in, so as not to make throttle response too sensitive for leaden-footed troopers in combat boots?) and you simply have to press harder. Then… woo-hoo!
The LSV leaps forward like a scalded cat, bouncing over the broken concrete of our test track on its 30x9.5 R15 sand tyres; almost immediately you need to snatch second, then third, and, given more room than we have to play with here, it feels as though it would easily top 80mph. The steering is quick and as direct as those balloon tyres will allow, so a mere flick of the wrist is all that’s needed to change direction; because the bulk of the engine and transaxle is positioned aft of the rear wheels, it’s naturally tail-happy and lurid slides are there for the asking. It is, as the troopers of 22 SAS Regiment doubtless found out in Kuwait, a huge amount of fun.
Fun, but not exactly what the SAS needed for operations that might take them days behind enemy lines. The LSV proved too lightweight, too limited in its load-lugging ability for the rigours of desert warfare. ‘Deserts are not beautifully flat expanses of sand,’ explains David Blakeley. ‘They’re full of rocks and large drop-offs.’ And he knows that better than anyone. At the start of the second Gulf War in 2003, David’s unit was sent beyond the frontline to find and destroy Iraqi artillery that was pinning down the American forces. Driving at night, his heavily laden Land Rover rolled off the edge of a ravine and trapped David underneath it. Badly injured and under fire, he was lucky to escape with his life, but it marked the end of his Army career.
For missions like these the Pathfinders used WMIK (Weapons Mount Installation Kit) Land Rovers, and the dependable old Landies were what the SAS reverted to after trying and rejecting the LSV. Of the 15 LSVs made, about six were returned to the UK from the Gulf and five are now known to survive. They had brief further careers with the Army – this
one is believed to have served with 5 Rifles and 1 Royal Anglian Regiment in Norfolk – but had all been disposed of at auction by 1997. This example was bought by a paintballing company (!) and later rescued and restored by a former REME engineer.
While similar vehicles are still popular with other countries’ armies, notably the US, David Blakeley reckons that the LSV’s total lack of armour makes it less relevant for today’s operations.
‘We are probably moving away from a military that’s equipped for full-on war fighting, like the Gulf Wars, and towards one that has more flexible kit suitable for peacekeeping and counterinsurgency; kit that requires protection. The LSV doesn’t have a significantly smaller signature than something slightly larger and much better armoured such as the Menacity or Jackal, either of which can also carry a three-man payload.
‘But as a hobby vehicle to use in the summer… How cool would it be to drive down the King’s Road in this? It looks just right and it’s way different to a World War Two Jeep or a Land Rover, of which there must be millions in circulation. There’s less than half-a-dozen of these left, it’s a proper, authentic Special Forces vehicle, and for 45 grand you could be one of just a handful of people in the world who own one.’
Yep, just that small matter of £45,000. Believe me, if I could scrape that together, the LSV would already have a new owner. It doesn’t seem much for something so rare and enjoyable.
Thanks To David Blakeley, www.militaryspeakers.co.uk/speakers/david-blakeley; the owner of the LSV; and Cotswold Collectors Cars, www.cotswoldcars.com, where the LSV is for sale.