Page 57 - MERCIAN Eagle 2021

The Foxhound Drivers Course
Pte Brine
When I attended the Foxhound Driver course it lasted a total of three weeks in which you learn everything there is to know about the vehicle, how to drive it on the road and off the road, and how to maintain the vehicle when in use. The first week consists of safety briefs and understanding the Foxhound. The second week is when you actually get to start driving the vehicles, and the final week is then any remaining driving that needs completing and a close down of the course.
The first week (what feels like the longest week) of the course begins with safety briefs on the Monday morning, a test in order
to show you understand what’s just been briefed. Following this you go on to lessons about the vehicle including dimensions, weight, names of parts, how to drive it, traction controls, what’s under the hood & how keep it running, which are all covered over the first week of the course. This is admittedly the hardest part of the course because of the amount of information you’ve got to take in and retain in order to safely drive the vehicle.
For the second week of the course, we drove up to Catterick in the foxhounds and we did a week of mostly off-road driving, a
few night drives and a couple of long road drives. We typically spent 5 or 6 hours a day driving around the back area in the foxhounds, going up slopes and coming back down, taking it alongside tracks, and just overall seeing what the foxhounds are capable of doing. This was probably the most fun part of the course because there are no road markings to follow which make driving it considerably easier than on the road, we also found
will put enough power in to get the vehicle to around 3mph so you would never roll backwards at a set of lights, which I thought was a rather useful feature. However, the same as every other green fleet vehicle
it has no radio or CD player which is disappointing.
I then finished the course by returning to camp and closing down the vehicles making sure they’re cleaned and prepared
ourselves stuck on numerous occasions which meant we had to dig ourselves out and on one occasion get towed out by a TCV.
We typically spent 5 or
6 hours a day driving around the back area in the foxhounds, going up slopes and coming back down
for the next person who comes to use them. Overall, I found the course to be interesting and rather enjoyable when taking it off road and during the night. However, the worst part about the course
is having to learn the names of all the parts during the first week but this is made up for
The ‘on road’ part
of the course I found
harder than the off
road because of how
wide the vehicle is,
it’s also a rather slow
vehicle which makes it a pain to other drivers and makes for rather boring long trips. However, the vehicle itself has some features to help when on the road and in traffic, for example the foxhound wouldn’t roll backwards when in gear even on hills it
when taking it off road during the second week. Ultimately, I would recommend the course to those applicable and found it overly useful.
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