1 March 1942. Farnborough, England.
The various Victor prototype tanks were now replaced with eight pre-production models. Vickers still felt that there were more problems to be ironed out before they were confident of starting full production and sending the tanks off the Royal Armoured Corps. There were various differences between the eight tanks.
The first Victor used an engine that had once powered a Hurricane which had pranged on landing. The engine had been stripped down and de-rated to take the pool petrol used by the army. The engine had a lot of miles on it, and it was basically hand built by Vickers and used in one of the earlier prototypes. The second and third tanks were powered by Meteor engines made by Rover. Again, these were ex-RAF engines reconditioned for tank use. Tanks four and five had engines made by Leyland. These were made from scratch, using heavier steel to replace the alloys more necessary for flight. Tanks six and seven were powered by Meadows’ Meteor. Meadows had taken the more unusual path of collecting pieces of engines that had been declared non-airworthy from the factories producing the aircraft version to quicken production. The eighth was a diesel Meteor that a team from Perkins had built.
Leyland had made the most progress in getting the Meteor into full production. It had been the recipient of a number of machine tools from the United States which allowed the company to build the engines without any need for cast off parts from aircraft production. The Leyland engine was therefore heavier than the others, but the weight difference didn’t affect the overall performance of the tank. Sir John Cardin had a small bet with the production team that the Leyland engine would be judged the best of the three. His reasoning was that the engine was built as a whole, whereas the others were generally patched together. While quality control was in place at Rover and Meadows to make sure the patches held, Cardin believed that Leyland’s engine would pass the stresses and strains with fewer problems.
Unlike the Valiant I and I* which used different diesel and petrol engines, there was no particular desire from the Royal Armoured Corps to complicate matters of needing the two different fuel supplies. The petrol engines were certainly giving more power, the Perkins diesel was underpowered by comparison, and Perkins accepted that more work needed to be done on it. Sir John Carden was aware that the Russian desire for diesel powered Valiants would probably mean, if the Victor was exported to Russia, that offering a diesel version would be necessary.
Knowing that the Victor was likely to be petrol powered had meant that a great deal of thought had gone in to providing large enough capacity fuel tanks to give the tank a reasonable range of operation. Like all tanks the Victor was designed to carry the external auxiliary fuel tank, and because of the expanded internal fuel tanks, the Victor could carry two, one on each side, adding another 60 gallons to its internal capacity of 130 gallons. The engine was a thirsty beast, using 1.43 mpg on the road and 0.76 mpg off-road. With the auxiliary tanks, the Victor would be capable of a radius of action of between 271 (road) and 144 (off-road) miles. The auxiliary tanks obviously added to the overall weight of the tank, but the increased power compensated, and as the external tanks would normally be jettisoned before action, the fighting weight of the tank would generally be better.
As well as the different sources of the engines, four of the tanks were equipped with the long 6-pdr gun and the other four had the still experimental 75mm HV gun. The aim of having both types, even although the 75mm HV wasn’t fully ready for production, was to check out the layout of the way in which ammunition was carried and how the crew would cope with the different layouts. The 6-pdr armed tanks could carry 74 shells, while the 75mm HV had room only for 64 shells.
Part of the controversy about the new Victor tank, in the light of the information coming from the Far East, was the absence of a hull mounted machine gun to supplement the co-axial. Sir John Carden had been adamant that the nature of the forward slope of the front armour would be compromised by having to provide a machine gun opening. He was also keen to keep the crew down to four, an extra machine gun meant an extra crew member, with the loss of space for storing more ammunition and the crew’s gear. He also was convinced that the provision of the HE projectiles for the 6-pdr and 75mm HV would more than compensate for the lack of the extra machine gun. The American lend-lease tanks all came with an extra mounting on the turret, supposedly for Anti-Air use. It was entirely possible to add the same kind of fitting, providing the tank commander, or someone else to the extra firepower. Whether that gun would be an American Browning .30 or .50 or a British Bren would be up to the RAC and the War Office.
The testing of the prototypes had been able to show up frailties in the suspension and gearing, so the reliability of the pre-production models wasn’t likely to cause any headaches. The question that those testing and evaluating would be the engines themselves and the crews’ ability to fight the tank. The next couple of months were going to be critical, the various bottlenecks to tank production, especially provision of engines and armour plate had to overcome.
