GOLDEN GIRL
13B 808 BUILT TOUGH
As you sit back comfortably in an air-conditioned room, staring mindlessly into the depths of your computer screen, clicking away furiously on one of the thousands of part-slanging websites simply to watch a pile of awesome arrive at your doorstep a few days later, it’s easy to forget: we have it good, people — damn good. In terms of car building, those that were doing what we do now in years gone by had it a whole lot harder than we will ever know today.
Step back 20-odd years to when building a car wasn’t as simple as googling how to squeeze a whole lot of kilowatts out of your 13B, with direct links to each individual component needed to get you there, and being only 16 digits away from having them ordered. Hell, back then there was barely any aftermarket support, period. And the little that modifiers could get their hands on, especially on a nameless island nation such as ours, would reem your wallet so heavily it’d take a Lotto win to see them clear the customs counter at our ports.
It was back in this golden era of the ‘work with what you have’ attitude that Jeremy Bodley’s 808 was built, and he was quick to point out to us that while he’s been a staunch modifier for many years now, this particular car wasn’t the product of his own hand, but that of a well-known rotary guru, Colin Kilpatrick. The build would eventuate while Colin was running his business, Rolling Addiction, which saw a handful of notable cars — including Carl Thompson’s quad-rotor Aristo and Curt Whittaker’s R34 — pull out from underneath the roller doors.
Jeremy explains: “It was sold new here back in 1978 as a four-cylinder 808 at Checkpoint Mazda Manukau where a local fella named Russell bought it. Turns out he only lives up the road from me, and was pretty impressed by what Colin had done with it after all these years.
“Anyway, it was on-sold and painted this current gold from the original light blue, before being swapped to Colin as a rolling body in return for a motor. Of course, it was half pulled apart by this stage and needed a bit of work.”
Colin would then become the mastermind behind what we now know the 808 to be, and it’s one of those cars that remains true to how it was originally built — a fact that Jeremy is proud of. As Jeremy tells it, Colin stripped the non-rotary nose cone and trim, and switched out pieces for the proper examples from a wrecked 10A sedan that he had gotten his hands on. He quickly set about whipping up a series of custom-made components to get it ready to light up Meremere at the infamous 4&Rotary Nats drags.
This would see an FC RX-7 13B dropped into the hole that featured large stage two port RX-7 S4 housings with opened exhaust ports and a modified S6 intake manifold to suit. However, while today you can pick up the likes of a brand-new, brand-name turbo for a couple of weeks’ wages and still have a handful of change left over, finding a suitable turbo back then was near-on impossible, and improvisation was everything.
Colin employed the help of Steve Murch of Motor Sport Engineering to overhaul the factory FC RX-7 unit, which would see it fitted with a 56mm compressor wheel and one of his sand-cast front covers to increase the size, while retaining the factory core and porting the rear housing. “No one finds an old FC core and casts a new cover in their back yard out west anymore, but back then, that was the goods,” says Jeremy. “It’s a relic of working with what you had; piecing things together.”
Likewise, aftermarket intercoolers of the era were breaking the $2000 bracket, and not having anywhere near that kind of coin to blow, Colin put in the research to reveal that a new Nissan Pulsar GTi-R unit could be had for a measly $450. It was fitted up to run through the radiator support and incorporate some of the pipe work into the structure of the body — all in the name of making things work.
And while it does run bigger injectors and a few other trick bits, exact details can fade from the mind in the course of 20 years. What is memorable, though, is the rebuilt RX-7 S4 turbo five-speed it now adorns after Jeremy managed to lunch more than his fair share in his ownership — perhaps in part due to such an aggressive clutch setup, hiding a Green Brothers Racing single-plate solid centre between the box and block, chosen for it’s inevitable use at
“Everyone wants more power, and things with fancy names, but I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about all that to be honest, I just want to use it,” laughs Jeremy.
the drags. Something that Colin still has a hand in, too, as Jeremy jokes that while it is no longer in Colin’s ownership, the pair have become good mates and “it’s had a solid after-sales service.”
Underneath you’ll still find the custom caltrac traction bars that were made with threaded rod and rose jointed ends to bolt to the rear leaf springs, along with a custom panhard rod to prevent lateral movement of the diff. These originally held sturdy a factory RX-3 LSD, although Colin would send that to the scrap heap — or more likely, the local trade and exchange — in favour of a shortened Mazda B2200 housing with 4.1:1 LSD head, after snapping an axle in the former at Meremere with an aggressive staging skid and launch combo hit.
Even the little details such as engine mounts and cross members, that are off-the-shelf purchases now, were given the love they deserved. The same goes for the likes of a the custom surge tank, oil catch can, and radiator overflow, all of which were made to suit the car’s constraints. “Some people might cut a cross member out of a plate of steel and drill a few holes or slap in generic items, whereas these have had effort put into them — going the extra mile when doing things, even if it would have taken three times as long,” says Jeremy.
“People often think of buying rotaries and finding a pile of problems and crap. Pull one thing off only to find shitty wiring, rust., and poor workmanship. This old battler has always been a solid car and is a testament to the treatment it’s been given.”
The longer you talk to the pair about it, the more you are reminded about how cars used to be built, right down to the fact that the power figure remained a mystery, having always been tuned by the seat of Colin’s pants. Jeremy intends to keep the package exactly as it is — after all, the setup has been going strong for the better part of two decades and remains a time capsule of how Kiwi ingenuity saw cars built in simpler times.
Jeremy has managed to learn the 808 back to front in his ownership after rebuilding the motor after some side seals were damage, a rebuilt turbo, along with a few gearboxes and a diff lunched during spirited driving