The armor was the only attractive part of this vehicle in Europe and with an introduction date in 1976 it offered only a small time edge compared to Leo 2 and M1. The notion of making FV4211 into a Chieftain with Burlington was pretty ill-advised in the context of fielding it in Europe ASAP. This would have been a better backup if they still went for MBT-80 and it would have better export prospects. Even if the talks failed anyway due to British conservatism and divergences of opinions on the tank, they would have been in position to finish their own indigenous tank at the same time as M1 and Leopard 2, avoiding the delays and flaws of MBT-80 and Challenger.Īlternatively or at the same time, ROFL could have properly worked on Shir 2 rather than making it deliberately bad, by using the more modern components of FMBT instead of old Chieftain ones, but with no aluminium endoskeleton. This way, they could have entered FMBT talks in a much stronger position due to modern components being in a more advanced stage of development, and possibly could have had a backup prototype meeting their specs.
MVEE suggested that RR design a new turbodiesel V12 in 1968, but it wasn't until 1974 that they seriously started working on CV12 and they were busy with the Wankel in the meantime. In hindsight the British would probably have been better off if they acknowledged in 1968 that the lower-end FV 4211 spec (high commonality with Chieftain but mediocre performance) would simply not cut it and instead leapfrogged straight to high-end FV 4211/FMBT spec, and started development of new components (preferably modern) accordingly.
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