About LR MAD

What LR MAD covers

LR MAD is a field reference on military, special and rare Land Rovers. The core of the site is the registry: type-by-type pages on the vehicles that sat outside the mainstream catalogue, from licence-built Santanas and Minervas to tracked conversions, six-wheelers and the armed forces’ own variants. Each registry page carries a spec sheet assembled from published figures, alongside the service story and the details that separate a genuine example from a lookalike.

Around the registry sits the magazine: posts on buying ex-military vehicles, the events that made certain Land Rovers famous, and the history that explains why a 1950s Belgian army truck has sloping front wings.

Published records over folklore

Low-volume Land Rovers attract stories the way their chassis attract mud. Production counts get rounded up in the retelling, one-offs multiply, and a vehicle that spent its service life towing a compressor acquires a special forces past. LR MAD works the other way round. Figures come from published sources: period announcements, service documentation, manufacturer records and credible specialist reporting. If a number cannot be pinned to a source, it stays out of the spec sheet.

Where sources disagree, the page says so. Plenty of production totals for low-volume conversions exist in two or three competing versions, and printing one of them as settled fact would be tidier but wrong. Both figures go in, with their origins, and the reader can weigh them.

Corrections

A reference site is only as good as its worst page. Errors, once demonstrated, get fixed rather than defended, and corrections backed by documentation are always taken seriously. We would rather run a shorter spec sheet than a padded one, and that preference decides most editorial arguments here before they start.

The registry grows as research allows. New pages appear when there is enough verifiable material to justify one, not before, which is why some deserving vehicles are not covered yet. They will be.