Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) is to spend an additional £1 billion with UK suppliers over the next four years amid continued global demand for the Range Rover Evoque.

JLR has increased the value of UK supply contracts by £1 billion, in addition to the £2 billion supply contracts it awarded to more than 40 UK suppliers in March 2011. These suppliers provide components, facilities and services to support the Range Rover Evoque production line at Halewood on Merseyside.

Viper Performance
From £240
www.viper-performance.co.uk

Viper PRO RANGE fuel tanks have a 3mm thick aluminium wall with a satin finish. Two standard sizes are available, 5 and 10 gallon with a sump system to allow you to use the very last drop and prevent the pick up sucking air when the fuel sloshes around. Supplied complete with fuel sender unit already mounted and filled with a yellow anti-explosion foam. An anodised aircraft-style pull and twist fuel filler cap, and mounting brackets.

Paul Hazell has restored the only complete survivor of the 15 TAC-T crash tenders manufactured. John Blackman takes a closer look.

Note the cut-down front bumper, a modification that harks back to the airborne Jeeps of WW2 and which would have made the TAC-T a little easier to load aboard the Bristol Britannia aircraft of the day

It has to be said that Paul Hazell is
a bit of a sport. I hadn’t expected for one second that he’d agree to donning a fire-fighting suit and pose for this month’s front cover like some sort of silver Stig. But there you are; let no one suggest that serious enthusiasts don’t have a sense of humour. And Paul is certainly a serious enthusiast when it comes to crash tenders, owning both a TACR-1 and the superb TAC-T you see here.

Paul traces his interest in crash tenders to having seen the TACR-1 at air days (his father was in the Fleet Air Arm) back in the 1970s. “I didn’t really know what it was at the time but tracked one down 30 years later and managed to buy and restore it. My interest is in crash tenders rather than fire appliances, and because of my existing enthusiasm for Land Rovers – I’ve had many of them over the years – the logical thing to do was to look at Land Rover airfield crash tenders. Hence I have a TACR-1, a TACT-T, and I’ve recently acquired an ACR-T which is another RAF crash vehicle that predates the TACR-1; it was a powder vehicle rather than foam. That’s the next to be restored.”