Thornycroft Antar

The Thornycroft Antar, known as the Mighty Antar, was a heavy-duty 6x4 tractor unit built by Thornycroft from the late 1940s onwards. It began as a civilian oilfield vehicle for hauling pipes over rough ground, with the Iraq Petroleum Company as its intended lead customer, and its name recalls Antar Ibn Shadded, a pre-Islamic Arab poet-warrior. From 1951 it entered British Army service, and for some decades it was the standard tank transporter of the British Army, towing trailers built to carry Centurion tanks, and it was also used by other nations. Power came from a shortened V8 land version of the V12 Meteor engine, derived from the Merlin and modified to run on diesel, known as the Rolls-Royce Meteorite, and army versions of the early 1950s also had a petrol variant. The Mark 3 of the early 1960s used an eight-cylinder inline Rolls-Royce C8SFL engine. The articulated Antars that entered service from 1953 to 1955 replaced the American Diamond T, and the last Antars stayed in service until the mid-1980s.