The record
By the mid-1980s the SAS's Series IIA 'Pink Panther' desert cars were two decades old, and the regiment worked with specialist vehicle builder Glover Webb of Hamble to develop a successor based on the coil-sprung Land Rover One Ten High Capacity Pick-Up. An order for 33 Glover Webb-adapted 110s was placed, with deliveries to Hereford beginning in November 1985 — the vehicles arriving in NATO green livery. The conversion stripped roof, doors and windscreen, added a stout roll bar behind the front seats, long-range tankage and extensive stowage, and provided mounts for a commander's GPMG up front with a GPMG, .50-calibre Browning, 40 mm grenade launcher or MILAN post on the rear ring; two spare wheels were carried. Power came from the 3,528 cc Rover V8 petrol engine (some later special-forces 110s used the 300Tdi diesel), and the coil suspension gave a far more comfortable long-range ride than the leaf-sprung Pinkies.
Although the type's formal name was the Desert Patrol Vehicle (DPV) — also seen as Land Rover 110 SAS or Long Range Patrol Vehicle — troopers carried over the old nickname, and the 110s were universally known as 'Pinkies'. The name outlived the paint: by the 1991 Gulf War the vehicles wore desert sand schemes, sometimes with disruptive darker patches, rather than the famous pink of their predecessors.
The DPVs made their most celebrated appearance in the 1991 Gulf War, when heavily armed columns of SAS 110s operated for weeks behind Iraqi lines hunting Scud launchers, and they returned to western Iraq during the 2003 invasion, driving search-and-destroy patrols from captured airbases. The type served as the mainstay SAS mobility platform from 1985 until well into the 2000s, progressively supplemented and replaced by the Defender-based R-WMIK and then purpose-built special-operations vehicles; UK Special Forces were reported to be retiring their last patrol Land Rovers around 2014. Preserved examples survive in museum and private collections, including the desert-camouflaged LRPV in the Land Rover Heritage Collection.
