Although, if you look at rolled over Perentie wrecks, while there is significant distortion of the front bar, none of the bars have penetrated the seat box and a survival space remains in the front passenger area. Not something that you can say about Series IIa and Series III army Landies after roll overs even at slow speeds.
The bars are not designed to be crash protection in motor sports doing well over 100KPH, in fact the Army didn't permit travel at speeds of 100KPH.
I work in insurance and a huge part of my job is sifting over mangled wrecks and figuring out what went wrong. I am also very familiar with the way in which our peace time military likes to cut corners. Believe me when I say that the ROPS on the Perenties are inadequate.
Comparing a vehicle with
any sort of ROPS to one with
none is disingenuous as is suggesting that anyone is claiming the ROPS should be up to motorsport specs. No one is saying they aren’t better than nothing but its a fact that they were an afterthought. Most of the rolled ones you see have tipped over onto their side at low speed on soft ground. If one of these rolled or flipped at 80kph on the black-top it would be an absolute massacre.
The ROPS are probably fine for off roading and cross country at low speeds but the fact is they would
never pass muster as a ROP system under ADRs (past or present) and nor should they; They would be completely inadequate in a roll over at
any speed on a hard surface.
Mounting them to the chassis would have broken the galv which, along with cost, I suspect had something to do with the decision not to do exactly that.
I'm not slagging off the military or the Perentie. Either way I'm working on a solution to the problem that doesn’t involve breaking the galv or messing too much with the heritage of the vehicle. Anyone planning to use theirs as more than a museum peice or occaional hobby car should look into options too.
