Bowin Cars - History

History

The car company was founded by John Vincent Joyce (1938–2002), a successful designer and builder of racing cars and in later years gas appliances incorporating Low NOx Technology. John Joyce travelled to England and joined Team Lotus as a Project Engineer, later to become the company's Chief Development Engineer during the mid to late 60's. While at Lotus Cars his responsibilities included design and development of all aspects of formula type race cars; Indianapolis 500, sports, rally and high performance road cars. His projects at Lotus Cars included the famed Lotus Europa, Type 41 and Type 40

On return to Australia in 1968 he started his own company, Bowin Designs Pty. Ltd., which designed and built racing cars for sale in Australia. Fifty six cars were built in total between 1968 and 1976. During this period he carried out several projects for Ford Motor Company and Leyland Motors on suspension design, to improve road holding of Ford Falcon, Ford Escort and Leyland Marina cars.

Approximately ten racing cars were sold for export to Canada, New Zealand and South East Asia. Bowin Cars have raced successfully in these countries as well as Europe.

Bowin Cars are best remembered for dominating the Australian Formula Ford scene with 16 podium finishes from 1970 - 1983. It took the UK car maker, Van Diemen until 1993 to surpass Bowin's all-time Australian Formula Ford ranking. Bowin Cars still stand as the best Australian built Formula Ford, winning a total of four Australian Formula Ford "Driver to Europe" Series in 1972, 1974, 1976, 1978. The company also built and competed in the Formula 2 & Formula 5000 class, however, the cars were never able to achieve the same success as it had in Formula Ford. A number of these cars can still be seen racing successfully in Australia today.

In 1976, when the demand for racing cars declined in Australia, the company changed its core business, branching out into making a wide variety of home appliance products from a new type of industrial cookers called the set n forget cooker to railway lighting systems. In the early 1980s the company concentrated its design, engineering and entrepreneurial expertise on developing a range of gas appliance products for domestic, institutional and light commercial markets world wide. In 1985 a modern gas appliance manufacturing facility was built replacing the old car factory site. During this time the company won a contract to supply gas-heating systems to government schools in Australia with a gas burner designed to reduce emission and improve air quality called the LO-NOx burner.

John Joyce the founder of Bowin Cars died of a heart attack in June 2002 and is survived by his wife Pam and three sons.