Perentti: the Claytons Corvette

With the body of a Corvette and the heart of a Holden, it was a kind of Claytons Corvette – or maybe that should be Bayswater Corvette, seeing as that was the Melbourne suburb where these home-grown V8 muscle coupes were made back in the eighties. It was an ingenious concept, a serious attempt at offering an affordable high-performance Australian sportscar within the constraints of what Australian government regulations would allow, and it did achieve a level of sales success. For all that, it’s a car that remains surprising little-known today; more than 40 years after it broke cover at the Sydney Motor Show, the name Perentti seems to have ended up somewhat lost in the mists of time.

Story: Steve Normoyle

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The business of manufacturing low-volume fibreglass-bodied sports cars has always been a tough game. And there’s probably nowhere tougher in the world to do it than right here in Australia. While (until recently) there’s always been generous financial assistance from government for high-volume local car manufacture, the story has been different for those making only a handful of cars each year.

The small players mostly got no government help – not that they were asking for any. What they did get from the government in the early 1970s was something they certainly didn’t want and nor asked for: a new set of Australian Design Rules so draconian that it killed the low-volume sports car industry more or less overnight. Among the casualties was Bolwell and its magnificent Nagari. As we noted in our 50th anniversary celebration of the Nagari in AMC issue #114, the Ford 302 V8-powered Bolwell was a world-class sports car by any measure, whether it be performance, style, price or build quality. The only thing wrong with the Nagari was that it was made in Melbourne, Australia.

The insane irony of the government’s '70s ADR crackdown to keep us all safe was that while properly engineered and manufactured new cars like the Nagari were deemed unfit for Australian roads, it remained perfectly road-legal to make your own fibreglass body and bolt it on top of a tired old VW Beetle chassis. By the late 1970s that type of kit car manufacture was all that remained of the once vibrant and innovative cottage industry making low-volume sportscars in Australia.