Go with the flow
In 1969 Bolwell stunned the Australian motoring scene when it unveiled its sensational new Ford V8-powered muscle coupe, the Nagari. Half a century later, the Melbournebased company has returned to its roots with a new-age Nagari. Just like the original, it boasts some innovative Bolwell-developed technology. Also like the original, it packs a performance punch heavy enough to knock even some of the world’s most exotic supercars out of the park. Bruce Newton sat down with Campbell Bolwell for this sneak preview of the new Bolwell, the Nagari 500.
“Toby said to me one day ‘I think we can t a V8 in this thing.’” Campbell Bolwell is sitting in an upstairs office of his eponymous sportscar company recalling the genesis of his latest two-door coupe, the Nagari 500.
Toby is Toby Hunt, the chief engineer and sole full-time employee of the auto and research and development business, Bolwell Technologies. ‘Thing’ is the Nagari 300, or Mk 10, a mid-engined sportscar that was revealed to the world in 2008.
Powered by a 3.5-litre Toyota V6 petrol engine (yes Camry, Avalon et al) mated to a six-speed auto, the 300 never made it on-sale primarily because it took years to wind its way through the Australian Design Rules process.
But a 300 sat downstairs in the Bolwell Technologies skunkworks in the Melbourne suburb of Seaford all the while. And Hunt’s everactive mind pondered it, even as he beavered away on other projects.
“Toby is a bit of a gem. He knows every bloody thing,” Campbell says. “He is very much the boffin and essential in this sort of work.”
And some years ago Toby just happened to mention to Campbell the fact a V8 could t into the engine bay.
“I said ‘yeah?’ and we had a look at it and decided with a bit of modi cation we could. So I said ‘OK, let’s build the next model.’”
That’s the shorthand version anyway. But it illuminates Campbell Bolwell’s love of a good idea and sportscars. He’s a man who – with family and friends – has left a unique imprint on the Australian car industry.
Now in his late 70s, Campbell’s automotive story is well known to enthusiasts.
He built the original Mk 1 Bolwell – a roadster based on a 1937 Ford athead V8 sedan – in his family’s Frankston garage at the age 16 in 1958. When little brother Graeme bent and buckled the panels so badly in an off-road excursion, a life-long investigation of bre-glass and composites began.
At 20, Campbell turned his passion into a business with the launch of Bolwell Cars and the Mk 4 sports racer.
The Mk 5 and stylish Mk 7 followed; both kits cars, both Holden-powered. In between came the one-off Mk 6 or SR6 racer, its mid-engined design hinting of things to come far further down the track.
The original Nagari – or ow, in an Aboriginal language – was the company’s gamechanger. It rocked the Australian automotive scene when it was revealed at the 1969 Melbourne motor show.
That feline onepiece breglass body, that thunderous Windsor 302 V8. More than 100 examples were built before those dratted ADRs forced Bolwell to stop building cars in late 1974, but the Nagari remains Australia’s most famous domestically developed and built sportscar. Almost exactly 50 years later in October 2019 at Motorclassica, the Nagari 500, or Bolwell Mk 11, made its public debut under the domed roof
of the historic Royal Exhibition Building in Carlton Gardens.Yep, the same venue where the original Nagari first appeared.
“The reception was absolutely fantastic,” Campbell tells Australian MUSCLE CAR. “It was important to be at Motorclassica, we really had to be there
“We got so much kudos. We were talking to the true believers.”
Perhaps even more incredibly, along with Campbell, the key people standing behind the new Nagari are much the same as the original; his brother Graeme and Ross McConnell, the next door neighbour who joined the company as a 16-year old and in semi-retirement returned to Seaford to help finish off the 300 and then develop the 500.
“A whole lot of innovation that went into the (original) Nagari and Graeme and Ross were the two principals that worked on it,” explained Campbell. “And here’s Graeme and Ross still working on the latest one.
“It’s amazing when you think about it.” So what are the key elements of the Nagari 500? Well, the first essential is that it follows the same high-power, low-weight philosophy as the original. It does that by combining a 372kW (or roughly 500hp, hence the name) 6.2-litre Chevrolet LS3 V8 with a claimed kerb weight of just 982kg.
That’s only 62kg more than the original
Nagari… mixed with an extra 192kW.
The engine is mid-mounted as per the Mk 10 and feeds the rear wheels via an Audi sixspeed manual gearbox. That makes for ballistic acceleration. Campbell is predicting under 3.0 sec to 100km/h – less than half the time it took the original Nagari. He admits his own test drives of the car have been… eye-opening.
“I wouldn’t give it to anyone at the moment to drive,” he admits. “I think they would kill themselves it’s so vicious.
“It’s just got so much power, you’ve got no idea. Even though it’s got 60 percent of the weight on the back wheels, you can spin the wheels in higher gears pretty easily.
“So you get a kick in a back that’s pretty vicious.
“We are currently working on more development of the car, which is the traction control and the ABS, which we have to have for ADRs. I think the traction control is pretty necessary.”
The use of a GM engine completes a circle back to the early days of Bolwell Cars. Of course, there would have been something romantic about the new Nagari also using a Ford V8, and Campbell says the Coyote quad-cam V8 could fit. But opting for the GM unit made sense for logistical reasons.
“It was easier for us to go with the GM stuff because we are using a lot of GM parts,” he reveals. “We are using Corvette (C6 and C7) wishbones and hubs and vertical links and things like that, a lot of that is GM and we can ship it all in one crate.
“Also, the GM engine was already through the ADRs.”
While using many off-the-shelf parts, the 500’s double wishbone suspension is tuned specifically. The chassis system also comprises an unassisted steering rack sourced from Europe based on a Ford Escort design, pneumatically adaptive dampers, a choice of cast iron or carbon-ceramic discs (355mm vented and cross-drilled up-front), PBR or Brembo callipers and Bolwell’s own 19-inch three-piece composite wheel design).
Discussion of wishbones and suspensions prompts Campbell to break into a smile and relate a story – such an occasion is far from rare for this cheerful and chatty bloke.
“I had a young fellow employed through a contactor to us – he was 24-26 years old – and what he didn’t know about suspension… he could have written a book.
“He said ‘I want anti-dive on this, I want 1.5 degrees on the front and 0.5 degree on the back’ and I thought ‘fair enough, what would I know?’
“He had all this knowledge – Ackerman and turning circles and all this stuff. He developed
It combines a 372kW (or roughly 500hp, hence the name) 6.2-litre Chevrolet LS3 V8 with a claimed kerb weight of just 982kg. That’s only 62kg more than the original Nagari… mixed with an extra 192kW.
the whole suspension on the 500, beautiful job, absolutely beautiful job. He designed all the jigs for the subframes and everything as well.
“The boys from Germany – Audi – came over, grabbed him and took him back to Germany. He’s over there now being paid a fortune.”
Inside, the 500 will be a far cry from its original namesake. Where the Nagari was spartan, this car will be luxurious and – to some extent – usable.
“It’s a functional thing,” Campbell insists. “Yes, it’s still got a boot, you can put your golf clubs in there, it’s still got push button start and electric windows and all this sort of stuff. It’s got the main screen in the middle and instead of a dash it’s got a small racing style LED on the steering wheel. There’s a lot of innovation in there.”
Campbell freely admits the technology of the current automotive world has surpassed him in some ways: “The wiring loom on the original Nagari was just bugger all and now you look at the 500, it’s spaghetti. I don’t understand it.”
But the car’s core is all about Bolwell’s globally competitive knowledge of composites. After it stopped building cars in 1974, the business took its knowledge of fibreglass and kept evolving and building, learning and expanding.
Truck bodies, kids playgrounds, wind turbine propeller, boats; Bolwell Corporation has done it all. These days it has bases in both Australia and Thailand and is a multi-million dollar business run by Campbell’s son, Vaughan.
The Nagari 500 is built around a composite kevlar and carbon-fibre tub, to which the engine and subframe-mounted suspension are attached. It’s a bit like the Monocell technology employed by McLaren for its sports cars.
Made using Bolwell’s closed-moulding vacuum-infusion technology, the tub is weight about 40kg. Cloak it in body panels and the weight rises to still stunningly light – around 100kg. That’s a key to the sub 1.0-tonne kerb weight of the Nagari 500, but crucially Campbell insists it’s also incredibly strong.
“Basically, we have an occupant capsule,” he explains.
“Super-strong, super-light… the rest of it is cosmetic. Doesn’t matter if the engine falls off or
the wheels fall off, you are just worried about the occupant capsule and retaining the integrity of that capsule. That’s what it is about.
“Without the subframes, that whole apparatus including the body – missing a couple of panels – is 105 kilos. Two men can walk around with it. Which is pretty miraculous.
“You are using aircraft and aerospace type glues and things. The glues we use here you’d destroy the part before you could pull it apart.
“All these latest technologies are incorporated into it and some of the moulding systems using vacuum which we have developed. I am not saying other people don’t use something similar, but we have a system that works for us that we have been developing.
“We use it here, we use it in Thailand at our factory there. That means we can get a
panel with the same strength for basically half the weight.
“So all this technology has gone into this car as a showcase for what we can do. That’s really where it’s come from.”
And this brings us to an important juncture. The reasons for the 500’s existence. Sure, it was a spur of the moment, sure it was emotiondriven by a bunch of blokes who just love cars. But it also acts as a vibrant billboard for the company’s composite abilities.
The original Nagari did just that in 1969. The Ikara kit car of 1979 was a rolling promotion of Bolwell’s light resin transfer moulding system. Just 12 were sold, but it also helped clinch a deal with truck maker Kenworth that continues to this day.
And as we’ve already noted, not one Nagari 300 has ever been sold, but it did help secure a big contract with a multinational in Thailand. The CEO was an Aussie petrol-head who loved Bolwell and enquired about the car. One thing led to another…
“Most of the contracts we get are because of the cars,” Campbell con rms.
The 300 is also important because it forms the basis for the 500. The mid-engine layout and composite body started here. And even that grinding four-year process to get it ADRed has bene ts for the 500.
“We are creating the Mark 11 based on the Mark 10 so all we are doing is getting variations of the ADRs for the 500,” explains Campbell. “In other words we are using different rear vision mirrors but they comply. So a lot of it is paperwork, just got to go through the mill.”
It’s also obvious the 500 is a styling development of the 300. Campbell’s original 300 design began on a napkin in a restaurant and it’s clear there’s been an attempt to lighten the car’s rear-end with more glass area and smaller
ying buttress pillars that still pay homage to the original Nagari.
And the 300 and 500 potentially share one more important link – one we hope does not
Campbell is predicting under 3.0 sec to 100km/h – less than half the time it took the original Nagari
transpire. No sales.
Yep, at this point Campbell simply does not know if any production examples will be built. Nor, as an obvious adjunct, does he know what they will cost. He puts the pricing range anywhere from $300,000 to $700,000.
“I really need a partner with deep pockets,” he admits. “With the 500 I can go and build half-a-dozen per year or something like that. I’ve got all the tooling for it and I can do it with subcontracting to some of our other companies.
“But then, we’ve had some sniffs from people in China with contacts in China and Saudi Arabia. With China, I don’t think it would be too difficult to get orders for 50 a year for the next two years.
“I can’t build them. I reckon I would need $20 or $30 million to set it up. Even if I got it I wouldn’t want to spend it on it because that’s very risky. But there are people out there for whom $20-30 million is not a lot of money.”
Campbell will be 80 in 2022, so even he accepts the challenge of getting the new Nagari into production is not something he wants to attempt alone.
“This is the ultimate Nagari,” he says. The implication is, it’s also his last.
So how sweet would it be to have 500s being built by the time this unique Aussie automotive gure does reach 80 and his business 60?
So calling for someone with deep pockets and a deep love of sportscars. There’s an investment with your name on it at Bolwell.