Sunday, January 12, 2014

1970 or 1972.

This is Gary's chassis plate.
As you can see it clearly states it is a 1970 coupe. But wait........
When the car came to South Australia it didn't have a chassis plate at all. If it had ever had one it would have remained on the previous owner's mantlepiece. In all of its racing years there would have been no requirement for it to have had one. However, in about 1993 Colin wanted to turn it into a road car. In NSW it was a requirement that all registered vehicles have a chassis number, presumably to help trace them if they happened to be stolen. I am presuming the inspector couldn't find a valid chassis number wherever he looked on the car. It would then be his job to issue one to it. A blank chassis plate would then have been legitimately acquired from Bolwell or the Victorian Bolwell Club to be attached to the car with the appropriate information stamped on it. Each state authority had the provision to issue engine numbers and chassis numbers if a vehicle didn't have one. N932898P is one of these numbers, where the "N" signifies NSW, the "P" is for police and the "93" shows the year it was issued. So this number was the 2898th number issued by the NSW police in 1993. As for the 1970 stamped on it I'd say it was a good guess by somebody but not necessarily correct.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

100% correct what John is stating on the Blog. Just as I stated, on anonymous comment number 15 under all those comments about the year which this Nagari was built. Finally whats actually happend to this Bolwell to be registered in NSW is a plate made up for registration. If you look at a Nagari ID plate they never stamp the year of manufacture on it.They stamp the mouth & year on the Australian Motor Vehicle Certification Compliance Plate (ADR). However, on very early Nagari's I have seen no year stamped on the Australian compliance it is just left with the ADR numbers.

Gus said...

1970 or 1972 ,it is an awesome car with a fantastic pedigree.I can invisage this car restored back to the glory days of production sports car racing running all of the originalparts-wow!

Paul Ewins said...

The mk4c has an earlier form of those numbers: VP 0xxx although I don't know when it was applied. Originally I think it just carried over the donor Imp's identity and the chassis retains the Imp ID plates. The name Bolwell doesn't appear anywhere on the car, something which made identification difficult when the car resurfaced in the late 80s.