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Michael Stahl1 May 2008
REVIEW

Bolwell Nagari

The resurrection of the famous Aussie Bolwell Nagari sports car proves life really can begin at 40

Reboot: Bolwell Nagari



Almost 40 years after its launch, the Bolwell Nagari remains the best-known and most revered of Australian-made sports cars. As taut and graceful as any contemporary Aston, E-Type or Alfa Montreal, the Nagari combined ruggedly reliable Ford V8 power with a 960kg kerb weight for world-class performance.


The Bolwell Ikara, meanwhile, was built in 1979. A frog-eyed, catfish-mouthed, mid-engined open roadster, it looked mostly like a wheelchair-accessible Mini Moke. Designed as an affordable kit car, only 12 Ikaras were made; less than 10 percent of the production run of the Nagari. Which of these two cars was the most successful?


Campbell Bolwell, who with brothers Graeme and the late Winston founded the Bolwell Car Company in 1962, would himself struggle to decide. (Graeme, incidently, had six months' experience at Lotus that directly benefited the original Nagari, and still works as a consultant.) Emotionally, there's no contest, of course: the Nagari, aka Bolwell Mk8, was the culmination of experience with earlier kit models, the car that made Bolwell a car manufacturer.


The true underwriter of Bolwell's success today, however, is the ugly-duckling Ikara. A car that was born and built literally among kids' playground equipment, sailboat hulls and Hamburglars.


"The Ikara was built to showcase our expertise in resin transfer moulding [RTM], which was a new system of moulding composites," Campbell Bolwell explains. "It was pretty basic sort of styling, but it won us so many contracts. It got the Bolwell group off to a pretty big start in supplying industry."


It's that success that explains the past, present and future of the all-new Nagari, launched at the recent Melbourne International Motor Show.


The new car's connections with the original Nagari don't go much beyond being lightweight (around 900kg), potentially very quick (an anticipated 0-100km/h in four seconds, via a supercharged Toyota V6) and fibreglass body.


Like the original, it won't be cheap, either. In 1971, the 302 V8 Nagari sold for $6195. The Falcon XY GTHO Phase III, launched that year, was $900 cheaper. (A Jaguar E-Type 4.2 coupe, meanwhile, was $8520).


For the new car, Campbell Bolwell figures on somewhere below $300,000.


Uhh, for a car with exterior lamps loaned from a Honda, instruments taken from a Toyota, switchgear swiped from a, erm, we're not sure, but we've seen it before?


Bolwell chuckles. "Aston Martin does it! It's a functional product, and at the end of the day, you want it to work properly. We make a lot of our own stuff, but ... we couldn't improve on a [Toyota] gear-change mechanism like that."


Bolwell, who drives a Porsche Boxster S, thinks the Nagari's price premium will be more than covered by its performance, ease of use and exclusivity.


"If you can get a car that's got a lot of the features that something like a Porsche has, yet it's faster, lighter, more nimble... The people who are going to be interested in this are going to be more senior people, CEOs. They want something unique ... something hand-built."


If you're calling this thing Nagari, was a front-engined car considered? "Yes," he admits, "but there's a significant weight penalty, and my concept has always been to get [the] performance from light weight. We've gone to the trouble of doing all this carbonfibre work, this aircraft-type construction ... we've been obsessive about weight.


"This thing is designed as a handling masterpiece," he adds. "We don't want something where we've got to compromise for understeer, or a heavy engine sitting over the front axle." The mid-engined car, he says, has a 65 percent rearward weight bias.


The supercharged, 3.5-litre, quad-cam Toyota engine has only an accidental similarity to that in the new TRD Aurion. The Bolwell boys had looked at package size, reliability, availability, weight and desired power output, and settled on the 230kg Toyota motor, saddled with a Sprintex screw-type supercharger (versus TRD's Rootes type). Bolwell says the blower is larger than TRD's unit, runs a modest five psi boost, and is pushing somewhere between 250-290kW through its Toyota gearbox.


The new car runs double A-arms all round with adjustable Koni coil-over dampers. (The '69 original had wishbones up front, but a Falcon-filched live rear axle with trailing arms.)


Indeed, the two Nagaris' chassis are similar only in that each is a product of its time; a rolling showcase for materials and techniques. The front-engined car had a Y-backbone steel spaceframe - courtesy of Graeme's familiarity with the Lotus Elan. The new, mid-engined car has a carbonfibre monocoque (a la Pagani), with front and rear sub-frames in aircraft-welded, box-section and tube chrome-moly steel.


The body is in fibreglass, again showcasing a fairly new technology in 'lightweight RTM', a vacuum infusion process. And if the first Nagari was a family matter among Bolwell brothers, the new-generation Nagari goes a generation better: Campbell's sons Owen (40) and Vaughan (36), who both work for the company, were intensively involved in the business and design.


Vaughan, a qualified industrial designer, claims a modest input to the styling. It had originated in a Panther Solo-like sketch in father Campbell's notepad seven years ago.


"The general design was Dad's area - I was just called in for the little areas that he was having trouble with," Vaughan shrugs. His dad confesses that one such area was finding the right shape for the roof's 'flying buttresses,' one of few visual links to the original Nagari. The upswept shape of the side windows (or 'daylight opening') is another.


"I must say, though, we've had a lot of happy accidents with the design," Vaughan adds. "There have been a lot of things that just went right, and we weren't expecting them to. We'd mock them up, and they just looked right... That happened quite a bit."


The 1969-'74 Nagari was hailed as a leap in sophistication: built as a turn-key car, rather than supplied as a kit, it had a one-piece body (rather than glassed-together sections) and replaceable bumpers. Sophisticated. Like Drum rollies were sophisticated, after chewing tobacco.


The new car has a custom windscreen, fully-fitted doors, shutlines you've only seen before in metal. The whole body, Campbell says, weighs just 65kg. The carbon tub (43kg) gives it Lotus-like rigidity without any awkwardly tall sills. "They're very clever," says Campbell of Lotus's extruded-and-epoxied chassis, "but they're a young man's car."


Don't take that, or the golf bags-for-two boot, or the Camry-sourced engine, to mean blunted performance ambitions. "The whole concept is practicality," says Campbell. "It's not a weekend racer, it's for people who want to use it every day. But people are gonna race them, we know that."


There's been one question left unasked because, theoretically, the bold young Bolwell brothers already answered it: can a family handful of enthusiasts truly hope to compete against mainstream manufacturers? The original Nagari was as potent and desirable as anything coming out of the majors.


Campbell Bolwell, having already spent "well over a million bucks" on this silver prototype, is even less fazed today.


"Size, I don't think, has got anything to do with it," he says. "There are some terrible things that come out of big companies! The basics are wrong, the fundamentals are wrong, yet they go ahead. So I don't think doing it the right or wrong way has much to do with size.


"But there's a history out there, a heritage, and we want to renew that, we want to build on it. We're not just a couple of guys in the backyard who built a car. We've got a substantial history behind us. Now we've got the means to do it the way we want to do it."


ADRs would allow up to 25 Nagaris to be built each year. But Britain, where Bolwell has extensive contacts, has a much bigger market for hand-built cars and is expected to double its restriction on specialist builders to 1000 cars per year. Bolwell could build them there.


Or Bolwell may build none. And therein lies the link to the unloved, but successful Ikara. The new Nagari is already doing its job now, as you read this. "If it never gets built, then it's been a brand-building exercise," Campbell shrugs. "It has benefits, whatever we do."


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Written byMichael Stahl
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