Kicking the tracks of a bubble tank

Test-driving a pre-owned Leopard 2 (not your grandfather's Pinto):

CBC's Nancy Durham films her tank odyssey aboard a Dutch training tank along with (left to right) Capt. Brian Corbett, Sgt. Mark Bell and Sgt. Andy MacDonald...

Even as a passenger, I had reservations about going along for a test drive in a Leopard 2. I had to remember it was my idea to do this.

The problem is I'm claustrophobic so the night before my visit to the Royal Netherlands Army Base at Amersfoort, I was sleepless. I imagined the suffocating feeling of having to film inside such a hulking piece of metal.

But I did want to find out what these second-hand, German-made Leopards are like. Canada is buying a fleet of them after all. And I wanted to know about the soldiers who drive them.

You can imagine my delight when I arrived on the base and saw my test drive vehicle. It was a modified Leopard 2, called a bubble tank. Instead of a steel-encased turret it has windowed cab on top.

It was up there that I spent most of my time, watching and listening as Sgt. Andy MacDonald learned the ropes.

MacDonald and I sat in bucket seats on either side of and just behind the Dutch trainer. We wore helmets with voice-activated mikes both to hear each other and to give instructions to the virtually invisible driver below.

The driver — in this case, Sgt. Mark Bell — sits deep down in the front, right corner of the tank. All that could be seen of him as we rolled up and down across the Dutch training area was a bit of his back. It was dizzying to look out the window and, yes, it was fun.

Sgt. MacDonald has been in the Canadian Armed Forces for 22 years and he's spent most of that time with tanks. These upgraded Leopards put a smile on his face.

"I'm actually very excited about getting these. Our other tanks were getting really old and we had to do a lot of maintenance on them. It was getting to the point where we were doing as much maintenance as we were doing driving, so the students weren't getting a lot of driving time."

I asked Sgt. MacDonald how he would compare the Leopard 1 with this newer version, the Canadian Forces were about to acquire. "Think of your old Ford Pinto from the 1970s," he said. "It was all right at the time. But now we've just stepped into a Rolls Royce [emphasis added]."..