Rants and Death Traps

The_Chieftain: Hmm. A lot of those older threads have been locked. I've started unlocking them.   The general impression I got from reading the Dracula (I presume that's what you meant) documents was that it was almost exclusively on-road testing.   It is certainly true that off-road use can strain components in different ways, perhaps bringing to greater light issues at low gearing ratios, for example. That said, inferior off-road performance is more a matter of design capability than durability. The tank will move slower, traverse less terrain, etc. But unless the driver's incompetent (eg, if mired in mud, caused by the narrow tracks of the early Sherman shown in the Swedish video, he continues to gun it to wear out the power train instead of accepting that he's stuck and waiting for a pull), I don't see component failure as being a particularly dramatic deviation.