I always had a thing about these - not easy to find, the 'poor man's Ferrari'.....the Opel GT.
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I knew them well. Owned three of them over about a 10 year period. Bought one running and resurrected the other two.
The first one was a '72, in that pastel yellow color, with a white interior. Good running car, but I didn't know how rusty it was in the frame, until I had an accident- and the bodywork actually buckled near the wheelwells!
I wound up transferring the engine and tranny into a straight 1968 Kadett wagon, which I then sold to finance buying the second one- a 1973, also yellow, that came to us with a blown engine. However, before I could get that one running, I wound up being more interested in a third one- a 1969, that my Dad and I found and bought for $35.
The '69 was a real labor of love, in some ways- it, technically, should have been a basket case (it was actually the front half of the original 1969 and was originally gold, grafted at the top of the windshield to the rear half of a 1970, which was originally green- and then someone painted orange afterward. It had also taken damage in the front, and someone had modified the "nostrils" to be bigger, running all the way down to the very front of the car, when rebuilding it. I took all that miscellaneous bodywork, smoothed it all out, and had it painted Corvette white on top, and black on the lower 6" of the body. Originally, it was an 1100- which I kept (the engine that came in it was junk, so I built up an engine that originally came from a 1966 Kadett wagon- I transferred the cam, carbs and manifolds from the GT, and had the head milled a bit, to bring up the compression ratio to be closer to the original GT compression). That little 1100 was a little screamer- it would actually do 100mph (where the published top speed was under 90mph)- it would actually top out at 6200RPM, which with the 23" tall rear tires, was just under 102mph. Also- and maybe due to the way it was welded back together (there were some pretty good extra gusseting plates welded in, that none of the others had)- it was the stiffest, best-handling chassis of them all. This was my first car in college- and I found just about every other maximum capacity of the car- including fitting four people into it once (to go from our dorm to the student center at Georgia Tech- one guy was scrunched up in the area behind the seats, and one guy was just sitting on top of another in the passenger seat), and fitting my entire stereo system (including turntable, two cassette decks, receiver, and my pair of JBL Lancer 33 speakers) plus all my clothes and such, to take them all home over winter break. There's more room in one of those than most people think!
After wearing that engine out, and getting tired of trashing the insufficiently-strong transmissions, driveshafts and differentials multiple times (the engine was un-killable, but the rest of the drivetrain certainly wasn't!), I accumulated enough parts from a wrecked 1970 GT, to convert it over to a 1900. Drove it that way for a number of years, until it became obvious that I needed a larger car (i.e, I had more than one friend at a time
). At that time, I traded it in on a 1984 VW Quantum.
During this time, my sister had accumulated the 1973 GT (which had been gotten running with a very strong running 1900 from a 1969 wagon)- and had also decided to sell it- so I actually wound up selling BOTH GTs on one Auto Trader ad (the guy who traded me the VW saw my ad too). During the time before we sold the '73, I drove it a bit myself- and it was probably, actually, the fastest one of the bunch, at least in a straight line. For whatever reason, that station wagon 1900 was STRONG- even with the tall gearing in the differential (3.18:1), it would pull ALL THE WAY to 6100RPM in high gear- which was, with the tires on it- 132MPH!!
I do miss these little things. Whoever described a car as feeling like a go-kart with doors, was definitely describing what it felt like to drive one of these. Tweak the suspension a bit, and they would corner dead flat- and with steering response that my Dad described as "sneeze at the wheel, and change two lanes before you know it". It was almost like driving with telepathy- they were some of the most responsive things I have ever driven, and I mean ever...
Regards,
Gordon.