Under a contract with the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) placed in November 2018, Ricardo (www.ricardo.com) is responsible for the repair and overhaul of the final-drive units of the British Army’s fleet of CVR(T) vehicles; it is now delivering the first replacement final drives for this family of military tracked vehicles.

The CVR(T) — or Combat Vehicle Reconnaissance, tracked — fleet comprises a range of compact, highly mobile and air-transportable tracked vehicles.

They include the Scimitar light reconnaissance tank and Spartan armoured personnel carrier, the Sultan command and control platform, the Samaritan ambulance, and the Samson armoured recovery vehicle.

The CVR(T) fleet has been in service for decades, so an early task for Ricardo was to investigate the historic supply of driveline components and establish a robust new process and supply chain to support the refurbishment of the remaining operational CVR(T) vehicles, which still play a significant role with the British Army.

The refurbishment contract being managed by Ricardo includes the remanufacturing of the key torque-path components of the final drives.

This required the company to establish a fixed process of stripping the final drives (two per vehicle) and evaluating their condition before agreeing a refurbishment or replacement action plan with the MoD for each component, then remanufacturing, rebuilding and packaging to modern UK defence standards.

In many cases, Ricardo has had to reverse-engineer the existing parts to derive the necessary data and information to support the manufacture of replacements.

With the first new CVR(T) final-drive units now delivered by Ricardo, work will continue on the remainder of the fleet in the coming months.

Ricardo Performance Products’ managing director, Martin Starkey, said: “This work — refurbishing the drive system of a legacy vehicle to modern defence industry standards — demonstrates the flexibility and adaptability of the Ricardo Performance Products team.

"Ricardo is already extremely well known in this sector for our work in the design and manufacture of new ‘state of the art’ vehicles such as the British Army’s Foxhound fleet, but this contract showcases our abilities to extend the life of existing vehicle fleets, including reverse-engineering legacy parts and establishing a supply chain to deliver replacements.”