Driving the 1973 Land Rover 101 Forward Control
Published in Drive Tastefully Magazine Issue #5
It could have been a shovel. Or, it could have been a canteen. Or maybe a t-shirt: its specific shade of olive drab hashed out by a distinguished panel of Colonels. Every piece of military gear, from buttons on backpacks to aircraft carriers, goes through the same exact military process, including the 1973 Land Rover 101 Forward Control I’m currently driving through the suburbs of Los Angeles.
The Forward Control, like its Unimog, Volvo, and Pinzgauer cousins, is basically a box perched atop cartoon tractor tires, its name coming from the driver’s seating position and not its place in battle strategy. I sense the gawking of bystanders but am too focused on herding the wandering Brit between lane lines to see who's staring. It’s certainly a spectacle out here among the Teslas and townhouses, but to say the Forward Control is out of place in this environment wouldn’t be entirely accurate. After all, the British Ministry of Defense required it to be at home in literally any environment.
Development of the 101 Forward Control began at the height of the Cold War in 1967, with the truck going into production in 1972. Great Britain had departed most of its colonies but still maintained a presence on every continent, and faced an entirely new set of future threats. Conflicts in Indonesia, Oman, and deployments to every imaginable terrain and climate, promised challenges the military couldn’t predict but could only prepare for. The army’s planners would have had long lists of necessary equipment, on them, a requirement for an off-road vehicle that could tow a 2.5 ton field gun while carrying one ton of equipment. Additionally, the truck had to be convertible to a myriad of uses, including as an ammo and troop carrier, ambulance, communications center, and even a mobile rocket launcher. External dimensions were strictly limited to just 170” long and 72.5” wide to permit efficient transport in the belly of a cargo plane. And, of course, the final vehicle needed to be able to actually start up, run, and traverse any country the cargo plane dropped it off.
Given these restrictions, Norman Busby, Land Rover’s designer on the project, recalls how he arrived at the vehicle’s compact 101” wheelbase calculation:
“I sat down and put four British soldiers, 22 inches wide each, in. … [Then] a 10-inch-side spare wheel … and it left a cab a bit small for the gunners … that’s why it’s a little cab! We wanted a good departure and approach angle. Draw this back down to the ground, draw the wheels in, and you get a 101 inch wheelbase.”
“A little cab,” he says. Back in present-day Los Angeles, I get it. I’m straddling the Land Rover’s nearly-vertical steering column and sawing at the wheel like a toddler on a Sit n’ Spin. There may not be a possie of British soldiers and a spare tire in the back but I certainly feel like my uncomfortable proximity to the windshield is a byproduct of the vehicle’s primary mission, which does not include my comfort.
At a stop sign, the truck’s owner sitting beside me, notices it’s idling high. The engine sits between us under a thin fiberglass clamshell, that a few seconds later is hinged back, and I’m hit by an upcurrent of hot, oily air from the motor roaring beside us. Careful not to catch any clothing in the alternator belt, the owner turned in his seat and hunched over the running engine, nudging the idle screw clockwise while my brain still tried to comprehend the scene.
We head off again on an ungainly trip though a subdivision and past a gated community. And soon turn away from Los Angeles and wind our way up a broken asphalt park road. Land Rover fitted 101s with the same all-aluminum, 120hp 3.5 liter V8 petrol engine and a slightly modified version of the 4-speed gearbox as was equipped in the civilian Range Rover. This truck currently runs a newer, yet still carbureted, 4.9 Liter variant and an automatic transmission donated from a Discovery. Despite this newer engine’s bump in power, this 101 doesn’t feel anything remotely comparable to quick. I can only imagine what it would be like to drive it with the original motor, though it probably would have plenty of torque in low gear, especially if one only needs to travel at the hiking pace of a solder on foot.
Another mile on asphalt and we pull off onto dirt, where the ground’s sudden undulations are exaggerated by the truck’s high seating position, unforgiving leaf springs, and a wheelbase less than an inch longer than a standard Range Rover. We’re on gentle terrain but the sensation still catches me by surprise. I’m clinging to the wheel like the top of a sailboat mast in high-seas. The truck’s owner is unfazed beside me, and as we continue overland, I too become used to the swaying and bouncing, the dramatic steering wheel inputs now feeling more natural. The Forward Control can handle this. It can handle a lot more than this. In fact, it can handle a lot more than I can, I realize.
Within minutes we’re in a landscape devoid of human development. The hills to either side are fresh with post-rain grass and a copse of burned trees sits silently in the valley. The sky darkens and it begins to drizzle. It’s like we’ve been transported in the belly of a cargo plane and carried to remote deployment via heavy-lift helicopter. We’ve timewarped. It’s eerie. It feels appropriate.
We stop the truck and hop down from the high cab. I’m glad my knees are good.
Referred to by British troops as the “One-tonne,” which they pronounced “one tunny” (because of course they would), most 101 Forward Controls were canvas-topped. However, those intended for use as radio or electronic warfare vehicles, and later ambulances, were given aluminum bodies, resulting in an even more dramatically box-like appearance. It is one of these “radio bodies” that sits idling here on this hillside in front of us. At this distance, with no size reference, it looks like a toy truck; its proportions just aren’t something my mind can instinctively resolve. And yet, the Forward Control seems perfectly balanced.
I imagine half a dozen young soldiers in a place that looks just like this: the middle of nowhere in Cyprus or Rhodesia or Wales, waiting for orders or even just a squawk from the radio. Numb from cold or baking hot, passing the time with cards or the best gentlemen’s magazines 1980 had to offer. One of them cracks the same joke for the third time today and gets an empty can of MRE thrown at his head.
Despite what Land Rover and the Army's Fighting Vehicle Design Establishment intended, to me, this vehicle is charming. Its boxoid shape, somewhere between tough and goofy, is so humorous as to be almost designed to evoke that response, especially emphasized by how the lower bodyline almost completely clears the top of the tires. On this one the decades of brushed-on camouflage paint help tone-down the impression of silliness, but I have seen pictures of one radio-bodied Forward Control that now roams the deserts of Africa, painted pink, like a rolling metal bouncy castle.
By the end of 1978, Land Rover built about 2,650 Forward Controls, and there’s no better proof of their robustness than the simple fact that the original production continued in service for the next two decades.
There’s an irony to driving an old military vehicle around in the modern city. One of these rolling across a foreign countryside was probably more often an unwelcome sight. Their presence did not always come hand-in-hand with peace. But we cannot help but divorce their history from their form, which was shaped from steadfast purposefulness and nothing else. As if to consider such a triviality as “looks” would be a misappropriation of taxpayer funds. As if some politician could have the beauty of a project used against him in a future election. But the real irony is that although these vehicles are the definition of serious, some, by nature of their size or quirks of their use, cannot help but have a personality. To me, this radio-bodied Forward Control, falls firmly among the latter.