Why you should drive a tank over a minivan at least once in your life

Closing the periscope hatch on a FV432 Armored Personnel Carrier is akin being sealed into a 30,000 lb. metal coffin. Fortunately, once inside, you have marginally better visibility than you would upon interment, looking out through a clear Plexiglas screen that is approximately the size and shape of the window on a business envelope.

“You can see, sort of, what is directly in front of you,” Tony Borglum — the 27-year-old owner of Kasota, Minn.’s Drive A Tank — tells me via our radio headset, over the din of the rumbling diesel engine. “But you lose your peripheral vision, your rearward vision, and your depth perception.”

The 30-acre property was an active quarry in the 1800s, but has since grown into a dense forest, and as I blast up and over mounds of local limestone, into gooey trenches, and across a mocha-colored mud lake, the combination of the landscape, the sightlines, the arcane controls, the treads’ massive articulation, and right-handed British driving position conspire to guarantee disorientation.

“When I first learned to drive on a racetrack,” I tell Tony, “my instructor told me, 'Look at where you want to go.' Not so easy in here.” As I crest one of the mile-long trail’s larger hills, I’m nearly blinded by the late afternoon sun, and as I break over and power downhill on the tank’s massive gravitational pull, I spot someone standing right on the trail’s edge. Tony’s voice crackles over the headset. “Don’t look at the photographer.”

The FV432 is the second of three tanks I try, having been offered a modified version of Drive a Tank’s $2,499 “5-Star General” package. Basic “3-Star Lt. General” packages start at just $399 but include seat time in only the FV433 Abbot SPG we drove first. So the majority of customers — 90% of whom hail from out of state — opt for the $599 “4-Star General” package, which adds a second tank. And more machine guns.

I ask Borglum who the majority of his customers are, and though he rattles off a lengthy list — bachelor parties, bachelorette parties, corporate team builders, father’s day gift recipients — he says that many of them tend to fall into a familiar category. “You know how they say that Corvette drivers are a mainly grey haired guys in their 50s? Those are the same guys who tend to come here.”

The experience also includes instruction in tank ephemera, an area in which Borglum — despite never having served in the military — is fluent. Outstanding bits of information lodged in my mind, like the 38-liter size of the Russian T-55 engine, and the quick interchangeability of the American Abrams’ power pack—a five-ton, cubic engine/transmission module designed for ready removal and replacement.