The record
SMC Engineering of Bristol launched the Sandringham Six in 1979, a coil-sprung 6×6 conversion of the Stage 1 V8 Land Rover on a 139-inch wheelbase. At the 1980 British Army Equipment Exhibition the company heard of a coming requirement for a mainly road-going military load carrier with limited off-road ability, and to meet its payload — a full platoon — the Sandringham was reworked into a forward-control layout as the FC82. Back-to-back seats faced front and rear along the body, a canvas tilt went over a frame whose legs dropped into sockets beside the seats, the floor was tongued-and-grooved aluminium, and the rear body had dropsides and a drop tail with small lockers between the cab back and the dropsides and more beneath the body between the front and rear wheels. The six-wheeler kept the Sandringham Six's specially shaped petrol tank above the rear axles; a four-wheel FC82 on the same cab used the standard Land Rover rear tank and a cut-down version of the six-wheel body. The FC82 was launched at the 1982 British Army Equipment Exhibition, on static display and in the mobility demonstration, but no order followed.
The surviving history of one four-wheel FC82 shows how the few built were dispersed: sold at auction as a dropside with tilt, it was bought almost new by a Range Rover hire business, passed after eight months to Heathrow Airport — rebodied as a mobile workshop and bad-weather rescue vehicle with work lights, extra batteries and a heavy rear tow bar, and reputedly the first vehicle painted in British Airways' dark blue and grey — then to a Humberside farmer who fitted a flat body for carrying a vintage tractor. No body drawings survive, because the coachbuilders built body sets to fit either the Sandringham Six or the FC82 as required, and the only six-wheel FC82 known to its restorer had also had its body altered.
The registry's model is the six-wheel FC82 as photographed at its launch: the forward-control cab with a flat Stage 1-style grille panel and bumperettes, the front axle set well back under the doors, the close-coupled rear bogie, the dropside body with the tall cab-back locker and the spare wheel standing beside it, in plain bronze green without markings.
