The Ron Hossack Mark 7.

With Darren Hossack in town for the Sports Sedan Championship round at Mallala this weekend I'm prompted to show you some photos of the Mark 7 his dad, Ron, built. Actually Darren is going to be very busy as he's contesting the Superkart races as well as the Sports Sedan races, he's the current National Champion in both categories. In Sports Sedans, he's driving the John Gourlay Audi A4 and no it's not the old SuperBolwell chassis. This car is a new one built in 2007 - 6-litre Chev and Hewland transaxle. There's a couple of Saabs there this weekend and one of them is equipped with a Ford 9" diff which sounds more like the remnants of an old chassis, but even the Dean Randle Saab Aero was built by him and is not a collection of old bits. Actually Sports Sedans are becoming pretty big-deal again these days, with lots of powerful cars, mainly Chev powered, but there's the odd V12 as well. I see Charlie Senese is running the Honda Prelude that was built in SA by Elfin Sports Cars. The association has an excellent website and I've put it in the link list. They have a great forum with lots of activity and I enjoyed seeing the references to Trump Engineering, Brian Randall's rotary powered Karmann Ghia, MacCormack's Charger and Jag etc. etc.

Anyway, it is Ron's Mark 7 that we're talking about here. Ron is an engineer and it shows. He has been, and possibly still is, involved in the construction of the Gourlay Sports Sedans. I have heard that he built his Bolwell on a tight budget, "investing mostly in his own labour." The wheels - steel rims and hubcaps.Note the body mods and how well executed they were. The exterior door handles were push buttons on the C pillar, to reduce weight in the doors. The interior releases were on the console (very TVR as Pete Garvin says). The window glass actually fully drops into the door cavity, the flat glass travels in an arc away from the door frame on its journey into the door. I can't explain it but it is a thing of beauty to witness I'm told.

Ron also did his own upholstery.

Interestingly, both the Mark 7s flanking the car are now convertibles and have been sold interstate. The yellow one (previously purple with pearl steering wheel - featured in Custom Rodder No.4) is Colin Moffitt's old one and is now in SA and undergoing a major rebuild in Wynn Vale and the red one is Allan Cox's old car and now lives in NSW.

Weismann GT

What about this Weismann. They're made in Germany. They are either V8 or V10 powered and come only in 6-speed manual form. There are coupes and roadsters. There must be a few around . There are quite a few different ones in Google photos and they are also cropping up on Exotic Spotter. The European GT championship races have one for a safety car and another one for a lead car.

A couple of nice Ikaras.

Just thought I'd share these before I stick them in my Ikara album. They're from the Henry Stork collection. The yellow one is at Calder. Must be the previous owner. It's still got all of its nose. The black one was at the McLaren Vale Easter event.

More Maclurkin/Edwards

Ranald didn't run the sports for long at all. It was new to the track when this skirmish with Charlie's Corvette occurred in October 1974. 2 months later he'd sold it to Alan in pristine condition because he was going overseas.

MacLurkin/Edwards sports again

I forgot to mention in the previous post that Ranald made this roadster from a coupe, the soft tops being in their infancy. Ross McConnell, who was working at Bolwell, remembers taking a wrecked coupe body to the tip and being followed by Ranald but can't remember any other details. Jim Shanahan also worked at Bolwell then and he remembers the body was from a Canberra car that was rebodied. That was not unusual, there were quite a few Nagaris that went to ACT, quite a few that were driven hard, quite a few wiped out and quite a few that went back to the factory for repairs or replacement. A lot of those Canberra Nagari guys hung around Reliance Rotary, a Rotor and Rally oriented workshop over there. A few good stories could come out of Reliance too one day, but I'm off the subject again. No-one's sure where the chassis came from but some of the "insiders" have thought it could have been possible that "Bolwell or Linley may have supplied an extra chassis for cash"! Gary Allen lives near Ranald, maybe he's heard a bit about the history of this beaut car.
Anyway, as you can see from the following two little snippets, Ranald sold the car to Alan in the very first part of 1974.

Peter Garvin has provided these two following ads in Auto Action where Alan was offering the car for sale in 1978 but he must have thought better of it because he was still keenly racing it 3 years later.

Finally, here's an article from the motoring section of The Age where Chris De Fraga took the car for a spin at Calder in 1978.

The Alan Edwards Nagari, where is it now?

Alan Edwards came on to the Nagari racing scene pretty early in the piece. Not as early as Ranald or Peter Warren or Steve Webb perhaps, but pretty early nevertheless. His car was, like John's, previously owned by Ranald. I remember Ranald's son (not Ranald the 2nd) saying somewhere (might have been at the Mk.10 launch) that his dad noticed a Nagari body on a trailer on its way to the tip and he followed it and acquired it and subsequently turned it into a racecar. I wonder if this is the one. I'm fairly sure that the car was built from bits, i.e. no factory history. (Please pick me up on this, Rohan, if I'm wrong.) Anyway, it was a beauty and always seemed to perform quite well. I seem to recall Alan with a Datsun 2000 as well prior to the Bolwell. This photo below was taken at Calder in its early days in its red white and blue livery.And this one is of Alan leading Barry Main and John Gourlay at AIR on the approach to the reverse camber.

The following three photos show a couple of later colour schemes.

I must say I have Alan to thank for supplying me with one of those Nagari front spoilers from which we took a mould which turned out to be rather useful over the years. Most of the Nagari race cars have ended up becoming road cars in some way or other. I have never heard that this happened with Alan's racer. He may still have it for all I know.

Gourlay Nagari No.2

The second car was new from the ground up on a brand new space frame chassis. This is it below in its black, red and yellow Lillydale panels livery. For a while it was purple and yellow with sponsorship from Goodies Speed Shop. Almost as soon as it was finished, ProdSports as a National championship ended.The car had a brief life as a Super Sports but that wasn't the intention when it was built. By about 1984,85 I think it all got a bit too hard. These 4 photos of the car were at a Victorian club show and tell in 1984 when Ric Kemp managed to borrow it and turned up with it on a trailer.

John Bowe got to drive Bernie Van Elsen's Veskanda. I would love to have seen him line up in Bernie's Bolwell after the K & A treatment against John (Gourlay) in the black SuperBolwell. Anyway, the body was removed and the car became the Mike Imrie Saab Sports Sedan. Later, Keith Rilstone rolled his Nagari at Collingrove and bought John's body as a replacement. After cutting off the flares, they changed their mind and pieced the old body back together. The unused body is still in SA and has a new owner who has another chassis and is building it into a road car. Peter Garvin has already mentioned previously that Darren Hossack drove the Saab for John and he is the son of Ron Hossack and I mention it again because later I would like to show you the fantastic Mark 7 that Ron built. What a tight little web of intrigue!

More 6-hour pics

Here's our intrepid runner putting Norm's wristband on. Years ago we had red sashes. The driver raised one arm and the runner just dropped it on. Now they have wristbands. Maybe the sashes used to blow off. The red sashes on a black suit looked a bit like a Kapunda Bombers footy guernsey. The pit wall team from left to right:- Greg Newbold, John Low, Dean Malone, Chris Gascoigne, Rick Wallace.

As above but with Robert Jacobs wearing number 3.

Buddha, an official, and Ken Stratton.

Ken and the all important tyre pressures.

Pete Schmidt must hide when the camera comes around.

The Gourlay connection

These topics just seem to flow from one thread to another and can go on forever I reckon. From the recent posts involving the Ross Bond Nagari have come at least half a dozen emails enquiring about John Gourlay racing history, no doubt triggered by sightings of his car in race photos and by Gary Allen's query in one of the comments sections. The answer to this question is twofold because there were 2 Gourlay Bolwells and I will deal with them separately. Well, threefold really, because John's first car was Ranald McLurkin's first racing Bolwell. John had two Bolwell racers, Ranald had two, Steve Webb had two. This could all lead into stories about Barry Main's racecar which was the ex-Peter Warren racer and Alan Edwards' open car which was another Ranald McLurkin car. Lots of these racing cars ended up as road cars, like the ex-Trevor Jones coupe, the ex-Alex Tsakmakis coupe, the ex-Allan Hanns coupe, the ex-Bruce Tonkin sports etc etc. Anyway, here's a brief rundown on B8/38 which was John's first sojourn into Bolwells, coming from an Austin-Healey background as so many have done. As Peter Garvin has said, this would be the very first Nagari racecar and I have photos of it at Winton as early as 1972 when Ranald had it and I'm sure some Victorians would have even earlier pictures. In those days I remember it being red and white, blue and magenta and blue with yellow stripes. Anyway, here it is, now in the hands of John looking relatively standard at AIR in 1977. This particular meeting was one where some of the Victorian ProdSports competitors came over to help boost our numbers when we South Aussies were getting ProdSports off the ground. There were 6 Bolwells racing that weekend, 3 from Victoria and 3 from SA. This second photo shows John gridding up alongside Ranald who by this time had moved on to a very potent TVR Griffith V8.

Some years later, John built another Nagari coupe dubbed the SuperBolwell and B8/38 was sold off and relegated to a road car. I recall one concession to its racing heritage being the light alloy front end. The purchaser was Peter Thiry from Wentworth in the South-Western corner of NSW. Peter was no stranger to Bolwells having built a Mark 7 "way back when" and also being the first private owner of coupe number B8/93. B8/93 was the factory demonstration car and was sold directly by Campbell to Peter, Bolwell being a friend of the Thiry family. Among others, subsequent owners were Kym Hentschke and Sue Lewis. Anyway, back to B8/38. On 13th May, 1984 Peter sold it for $5000, presumably to Dr. Steve Bernard (excuse me Steve if I haven't spelt your name correctly, someone might like to pick me up on that one). The following year (1985) Steve brought it along to that year's Easter gathering, see the 2 photos below.

I don't remember when, but it was later bought by Richard Gac from South Australia and here is Richard in the motorkhana at the 1991 Easter event.

Sometime later Richard had a lose at Mallala when something broke and it was stacked fairly badly. For years it languished at his workshop while Richard was busy racing Superkarts. I'm not sure how the repair is going. I haven't seen Richard lately.

Gaisberg Hillclimb, Austria.

Bruno Von Rotz took his Milano GT over to Austria for the recent Gaisberg Hillclimb. He sent this photo. The Milano appears to be in very good company. This is a gathering of competing cars at the top of the hill. It must be a bit like Mt. Alma with no return road other than the way you came up. In the background you can see a 904 GTS crossing the finish line (one of 5 such cars competing on the day I might add).Gaisberg might have a bit more history attached to it than Mt. Alma since it was a prominent European hillclimb from the thirties until 1969. For the last 8 years or so it has been an historic event. It is a supplement to the serious racing on the Salzburg city circuit and the Salzburgring. Bruno tells me that it was supposed to a regularity event but you wouldn't know it as they were getting stuck into it a bit. It looks like historic petrolheads are the same around the world. I'm thinking of some "demonstration laps" at Grand Prix events and a few runs to the Eagle and even the reference to "spirited drives" at Lobethal.

Bit by bit I think we're making progress with Bruno's attempt to gain an FIA European historic logbook, hurdling each roadblock as it appears, but some help is required in the form of proof of racing history in Australia from 1962 to 1968 for this car or any other Milano GT of the time. If there's anybody out there who has some photographs, race results, old programs, copies of Racing Car News, Autosportsman, etc. etc. etc., that might have some reference to Milanos in that era, could they let this blogsite know?

Photos

Just in case nobody has noticed I thought I'd let you know there's a few more Easter photos on the Flickr photostream link. I'll keep adding from time to time. You get a new quota each month. So check it every now and then.
And now that I have your attention, are there any South Australians out there that have a few spare red clay bricks they don't want? We only need about 20. We've picked up the the old woodstove after its rebuild in Lobethal and before it can go back into the kitchen we'll need to build another base for it.

Lotus Evora

I've just been reading a road test on the new Evora in "Winding Road" magazine. I was attracted by the photographs and I think it is the best looking Lotus to have been produced for ages. Much better than the Elise for example.

It too is powered by the Toyota 3.5litre transverse mounted V6 with the 6-speed manual gearbox. It has 39/61 fore/aft weight distribution and is apparently fantastic to drive, handling better than a Porsche Cayman for example. Torsional rigidity is also better than the Porsche as well. What does everybody else think of this little beauty?