The record
The Royal Ulster Constabulary designed its own armoured Land Rovers. Following a Home Office meeting in November 1961 an in-house RUC team drew up the first fully armoured Land Rover in 1962; a mild-steel prototype was finished by January 1963 and an armoured, three-man, turreted prototype on a Series IIA chassis followed in 1964 (registration 4471 AZ in the PSNI Museum photograph reproduced by Joint-Forces.com). After acceptance the design went into production with Short Brothers of Belfast as the Shorland Armoured Car, used by the RUC from 1966. Two decades later, while the force was adopting Hotspur-bodied Land Rovers and buying up Shorland SB401s, the RUC's Research and Development Establishment built a small number of experimental armoured Land Rovers, the Shenzi and the Simba, on utility chassis to improve crew protection against ballistic and blast threats; their sharply angled, sloping rear armour made them easy to tell from the rounded Tangi. Only a handful entered service, but they mark the transition between the Hotspur era and the purpose-built Tangi fleet.
The registry's model follows the queue's reference photograph — the 1964 prototype — as directed: the Shorland Mk1 hull with headlamps set low in the wing fronts, no lamp guards, a louvred grille panel and two large top-hinged screen flaps propped open. It carries the armoured and turret-weapon perks in the game.
