Good Sports
Sydney Morning Herald
Friday June 20, 2008
The roads are littered with failed attempts to build the Australian dream - but we're still trying.
Canberra businessman Matt Veal reckons the best and worst thing about his yellow Elfin Streamliner is that "it ruins every other car you drive".He opted for the V8-powered Elfin - a rambunctious meagre-volume hand-crafted weekend escape vehicle manufactured in Melbourne - ahead of imports such as the Nissan GT-R, Porsche 911 and the Westfield kit car. "They're all relatively mundane compared to the Streamliner," he says."It looks fantastic, it goes fantastic, it's a bit different and it's got a decent level of performance. It goes like a Porsche for half the price." The lone Elfin in the ACT, it's a look-at-me car, Veal agrees. "Every time I pull up somewhere, people want to look at it and talk about it." The Elfin brand is enjoying a second burst in the sunshine after great success between 1959 and '84 as a race-car constructor (with a few Clubman road cars). Taken over in 2006 by Walkinshaw Performance, which also steers Holden Special Vehicles, Elfin has two Mike Simcoe-designed open-top models, the Streamliner ($99,990) and the Clubman ($84,990). Elfin is a rare recent triumph in the roller-coaster ride of Australian low-volume specialist sporting cars.Our roads are littered with the metaphoric wrecks of dozens of dream machines that crashed heavily into economic pragmatism.For some Australians, taking a vision to reality in the form of designing and building a low-volume sporty car is an irrational urge from within that can't be suppressed by common sense or the sobering veracity of history.They came, they promised and they usually fizzled out. They were weird and wonderful cars bearing names such as the Ascort (a VW Beetle-based hardtop), Standard 10-powered Buchanan Cobra, Hunter (which used Holden running gear), Golf-powered Bolwell Ikara, Nota, Corvette-influenced Perentti (built on a Holden panel van chassis), Chimera, Giocattolo and Ilinga AF2, which used Leyland P76 mechanicals. They found unity and commonality only in their ultimate fate, fading quickly after a short burst of interest.Remembering the once-major car brands that have flamed out (think Austin Healey, Lagonda, Triumph, Wolseley, Morris, DeSoto, Oldsmobile, Studebaker and many others), it's pushing credibility to believe a local independent can rise above the funding, engineering, regulatory and marketing challenges to create a tour de force.One of the great sports car tragics is Campbell Bolwell, whose Nagari cars were artistic if not financial hits in the 1970s before the creator steered his business back into making industrial composites (and money).The Nagari is an Aboriginal name meaning "flowing" and not "big, black money pit" as some may have wrongly guessed.Now Bolwell is at it again, with an all-new Nagari supercar, this time a lightweight (920 kilograms) mid-engined two-seater coupe with a carbon-fibre tub and a carbon-composite body."We're doing it because we're masochists," Bolwell jokes. "Cars have been my passion for the last 50 years and our company is big enough today to do the new Nagari. There are also sound commercial reasons. While we don't anticipate making a lot of money, the car is vital to our branding." The old Nagari hit trouble because the then-small company didn't have a strong financial base. Today it has the money, and access to far better technical input, Bolwell says.The new Nagari shape is a work in progress. The exaggerated low-slung lines of the car seen at the Melbourne motor show hinted at styling cues from Ferrari, McLaren F1, Lamborghini and the much-admired original Nagari. The Bolwell Car Company is making three samples of the new car. The favoured powerplant is not the Ford V8 of old but a modern supercharged 3.5-litre V6 from the TRD Aurion. Many car concepts have appeared at motor shows - only to have economic and regulatory reality put the brakes on production plans. "It may be coincidence but in 40 years of increasingly stringent design, safety and emissions regulations, Australia hasn't produced a single successful, all-our-own-work low-volume car of the kinds that flourished before the '70s," says Mike McCarthy, sports car enthusiast and the editor of the long-gone Sports Car World magazine."But many well-meaning original-design projects have gone belly-up before finding their feet." McCarthy says Australia's regulations are tougher than almost anywhere.A hit of the 2006 Melbourne show was the Redback Spyder, built after an inspirational awakening at the Le Mans race by Nick Tomkinson."I always wanted my own race car for the road," Tomkinson remarked at the time. So, with some funding from an American investor and assistance from more than 40 supplier companies, he handmade one car and then another, with a mid-mounted 5.7-litre V8 in a lightweight race-inspired chassis cloaked in carbon fibre."I'm proud that one was exported to a collector in the United States, and I'm stoked that I have one of my own," says Tomkinson, who drives it at track days. "It handles and it flies." There won't be more of that car made, however. Tomkinson has cut up the moulds. But he isn't finished with special performance cars. "I have another on the drawing board." The Skelta G-Force is another dinky-di original designed and built in Queensland by a group headed by Ray Vandersee and selling for about $134,000. With polarising looks and a choice of carbon-fibre or glass-fibre bodies, it uses standard Honda S2000 running gear, which Vandersee says is a huge advantage, making it easy to drive on road or track.Some of today's local low-volume sporting cars pay homage to the past. One is the Chamonix 550 Spyder, a modern replica of Porsche's first racing car.Dynamics, safety, and performance exceed those of the classic original. It weighs just 720kg, so the acceleration is lively.Chamonix Australia's Peter Gillard says the 2008 version, priced from $57,800 plus 3 per cent stamp duty, captures the spirit and feel of one of the greatest sports cars of all time. Assembled in Canterbury from chassis and composite body parts made in Brazil, the 550 Spyder is powered by a 121kW horizontally opposed 2.5-litre engine from Subaru, found in Foresters, Outbacks and Libertys, linked to a Subaru five-speed transaxle. First deliveries of road-compliant versions, with leather and carpets of course, will come in August. The Bufori range, inspired by the classic long-snouted designs of 1930s luxury roadsters, is another motor show circuit regular. Bufori is a special case. Though sold here since the late 1980s, for 14 years it has been no more Australian than Vegemite. In the late 1990s its production facilities were transferred to Malaysia, where labour is cheaper."Because of our small market and tough regulations, it's doubtful Bufori, or any comparable venture, could survive without going offshore," McCarthy says."Perhaps the hard-liners are right; we don't need local low-volume cars," he muses, before adding: "The hell we don't."
© 2008 Sydney Morning Herald