This Series 8 Bolwell Nagari came to George May some thirty-four years ago. In fact he rebuilt it from a wreck. A young George put so many new parts into the car that it might have been easier to start from scratch. Since then it has never been in an accident, has never had a respray, and has never been driven in the rain.
After a 10,000-mile journey and a chequered history including five years locked away by the customs people, this lovely Shadow II found a caring Australian home.
While airbags have been an almost ubiquitous safety feature on cars since the 1990s, their origins can be traced back to American engineer John Hetrick in 1952. In the spring of that year, Hetrick, his wife and his seven-year-old daughter were out for a Sunday drive in their 1948 Chrysler Windsor. Cresting a hill, Hetrick encountered a rock in the road and swerved to avoid it.
Elsewhere in this issue you can read all about how the NSU Ro80 wasn't the fragile horror that it's often made out to be, but here's where the Wankel rotary engine started; with the NSU Spider, which was the first production car to feature such motive power. Launched in 1964, the Spider was a two-seater convertible with a rear-mounted engine. That engine was a single-rotor unit that put out 50bhp, and the more you revved it the smoother it became. Red-lined at 6000rpm, it was possible to spin it all the way to 8000rpm, and presumably self-destruction soon after.
A decade ago, you’d have put money on the sports/supercar market being the sector where EVs and hybrids had the least chance of success. Yet the latter is now saturated by makers boasting EV powertrains with ever-increasingly ridiculous horsepower figures.
By and large, when it comes to the business of fitting innovative technologies into their cars, automobile manufacturers tend to reserve such features for their flagship models or limited-run offerings. The price tags and discerning clientele who can afford it justify the cost of such fancy features.
As a young 18 year old my first car was a Mazda 1300. I had the big dream that my next car would be a Ford Falcon XY GT 351. My brother told me I was mad, you will kill yourself and so the search of an alternative ended up with the purchase of an Italian Lancia Beta Coupe. This is where my love of Fiats and Lancia’s came from, sharing a common twin cam motor and very easy to work on while offering enough performance and driving enjoyment.
