jan 18, 1975 - 1975 EAGLE Motor Company
Bandit RX Turbo
Description:
The Bandit was released in January of 1975 with a list price of $8.500. Despite not being a sucessful car saleswise, it marked a certain milestone for EAGLE Motor Company: It featured the company's first turbocharged engine.
Under the bonnet is a twin-turbocharged 4.0L (3.995 cc) 60° V8 engine. It makes around 317 horsepower and massive 456Nm of torque, in a car only weighing 1.165kg. While the numbers sure are impressive, the tuning was not.
This combination proved to be quite the handful, as the car suffered from horrible wheelspin once the turbo kicked in at around 3.500-4.000RPM, causing many drivers to spin out and crash.
The car did gather a bit of a cult following due to it's eye-catching design, with it's bare steel finish and the gaping hole in the bonnet made for the engine to fit, but never really caught on in the markets. It was later discontinued in mid-1976. Eagle released a tamer MKII version in 1977.
However, the Bandit did get a 2nd life via another manufacturer. In 1980, Mexican billionaire Ruben Navarro purchased the remains of bankrupt American manufacturer McNamara Motors. Navarro and his men soon got to work transforming the ashes of McNamara into Mexico's national automaker, Dorex, headquartered in the heart of Mexico City and with plants in Puebla and Veracruz.
Navarro's daughter had been begging him to build a small sports car to compete with the stream of small chuckable imports like the 240Z, Mitsubishi Starion, MGB, and Triumph TR6 that had been flooding the American market and also enjoyed moderate success in Mexico. Unfortunately, Navarro soon realized that McNamara had never developed a suitable platform for small sports cars, and thus he had to look elsewhere.
A solution presented itself to Navarro when he found that American automaker Eagle Motor Company was willing to commission out the platform used for the Bandit. Navarro paid up, and the rights to the Bandit's lightweight chassis and body were acquired by Dorex.
The Bandit was a lightweight, gorgeously styled, drift happy, fun loving, V8 sports car. What did the genuises at Dorex turn it into? A shoddily built(using low quality Mexican steel and underpaid Guatemalan migrant labor), anonymous looking small coupe with an absolutely lethargic 4.4 carburated V6, a three speed manual and a sloppy viscous LSD.
(McNamara and it's story made by a fellow Automation user, WelcometoCostcoILU)
Price at launch in 1975:
$8.500
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