I am a Royal Armoured Corps soldier. I'm pretty much qualified to drive practically the entire armoured fleet of the british army but one of my true joys is driving the CVRT range of vehicles. Actually to be more specific, it's driving the Scimitar of the CVRT family. Truly a nimble little beast, I've managed to get one of these to take air on the Catterick training area many times and recently at BATUS, I don't think it's possible to do this with any other armoured vehicle.
All armoured vehicles have their own little idiosyncrasies and there are skills and drills involved with driving them. With the CVRT family it's knowing when to go fast and slow. They are capable of incredible speeds but unfortunately they have a major drawback in that their very light weight means that terrain can present a real problem for them, go too fast and you bounce to such an extent it hurts, with most other armoured vehicles their weight dampens it out (And the more modern ones have hydrogas suspension).
Unfortunately the CVRT family are showing their age these days and are very unreliable to the point where you pretty much expect your vehicle to break down. The upshot is though they can be fixed with bits of string (Quite literally...at BATUS recently I had to tie a Scimitars air filter to the engine mount until the REME could look at it after its housing bolts snapped off using paracord). Also these days, manually traversed turrets simply don't cut it. They where designed for one thing and one thing only, to be extremely light and quick for sneaky beaky recce ops and so their armour is aluminium which doesn't really even offer adequate protection against 7.62.
The CVRT family still does not have a firm successor in the british army, primarily because of the move away from heavy armour and also because there is still no tracked vehicle today that completely replicates its peformance capabilities. There is talk of an upgraded version with hydrogas suspension and powered turret but personally I don't think it will come to pass.
One of the other little quirks of the CVRT family is that the driver sits quite literally on the left of the engine, with only a 7cm thick partition called the "firewall" separating him from the engine. This means he feels the heat coming from it which is either a blessing or a curse. In the -26 temperatures of Poland, it was a blessing. In the +38 temperatures of the prairie in BATUS (Canada) it's a curse!
If there was a top gear of armoured vehicles, the CVRT would be the one where Jezza is saying "This is crap, thats crap, nothing works but damn driving it makes you feel good".
Now thats crazy when you consider it has tracks and not wheels (as such)
