SAS Series III Patrol.

The Special Air Service's association with open, heavily-laden patrol Land Rovers is real and well documented, but it brackets rather than includes the Series III. From 1968 Marshall of Cambridge converted 72 Series IIA 109s into the famous 'Pink Panther' deep-penetration patrol vehicles - doors, roof and windscreen removed, four fuel tanks, sand tyres and weapon mounts - which served through the Series III era until 1984-85. Their replacement jumped a generation: 33 heavy-duty One-Ten Hi-Cap-based Desert Patrol Vehicles prepared by Glover Webb, delivered to Hereford in November 1985 and used to hunt Scud launchers in Iraq's Western Desert during Operation Granby in 1991. Published accounts of SAS Mobility Troop vehicles pass directly from the IIA Pinkies to the 110 DPV with no intervening Series III patrol variant.

The build recorded here imagines that missing chapter: a Series III-era 109 stripped to the same pattern - open body, stowage everywhere, a jerry-can drop at the rear - and finished in the two-tone sand-over-green disruptive scheme the British Army used for desert theatres rather than the Pinkies' famous rose pink. The look is grounded in surviving vehicles: the reference photograph shows 52 GJ98, a preserved 109 with Series III-pattern wing-mounted headlamps dressed as an SAS patrol vehicle in exactly this camouflage, photographed among reenactors at the War and Peace Show in 2010. Vehicles like it keep the SAS desert patrol silhouette alive on the show circuit, but this specific configuration is an unidentified original rather than a catalogued military variant.

Research status: draft — identification, dates or figures could not all be pinned down; the summary says what is unresolved.