If there was a parallel in aviation for our good ol’ Mahindra Bolero, it would have to be the Lockheed Martin C-130 ‘Hercules’. By the first Gulf War, it had been around for nearly three decades, and in the C-130E disguise then, it had started to show its limitations. It couldn’t fly farther, nor land on shorter airfields or even get there quicker. Lockheed then, in an act of saving its business, took it upon itself to make an advanced C-130. Their skunk works didn’t fail and out of Lockheed’s gates emerged the C-130J – so radically different that other than the C-130 tag, it shares close to nothing with its predecessor underneath the skin. It’s still the backbone of the US Air Force and (smirk, smirk) will soon be a part of the Indian Air Force too.
The Bolero is no different then. From Armada colours to the Bolero suit, the ute has radically altered people’s perceptions. And the numerous revisions and facelifts have just ensured this post WW II chassis will chug itself into automotive history books. But it seriously needed that dose of ‘skunk’ works magic, and in just eight months flat, Mahindra have gone from DI wonderment to CRDe glory, bringing with it an added – more power.
Power corrupts...
Using the same 2523cc XDP3 block as the basis of the project, Mahindra added a common rail head from Bosch India. Unlike the mHawk project, where a third party was involved in fine tuning, M&M did the job in-house with system specific testing done at Bosch’s end. The second generation common-rail unit, with 1600 bar pressure and a fixed-type wastegate turbocharger from Turbo Energy (same as on the DI) has helped liberate 97 bhp@3800 rpm – an increase by more than 50 per cent over the DI! Torque too has seen an upward revision – sending 25.7 kgm of peak turning force to the axles, against the 18.1 kgm that the DI currently produces.
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