Junkyard Find: 1969 Opel GT
Strangely, the Opel GT is one of the more common 1960s German Junkyard Finds. I find many more Type 1 Beetles, of course, and the Mercedes-Benz W110 shows up fairly regularly, but I’ll see several Crusher-bound GTs every year. Here’s a two-tone Brown GT I spotted in California a couple of weeks back.
The 1.9 liter SOHC four put out a pretty decent 102 horsepower in the 1969 GT.
It appears that some sort of Opel-eating monster took a big bite out of the trunk lid.
This car has been used up, though drivetrain and chassis parts may still have some life left in them. I’ve let Team Tinyvette know about this car, and they’ll be paying it a visit in order to harvest its very fragile transmission.
The GT was marketed as sort of a miniature Corvette, while the Manta was more of a German Camaro. Here we see a rotund Stalingrad vet trying and failing to squeeze into a GT.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Hagerty and The Truth About Cars.
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Where do I start, again. You're comparing the '67 Rekord with the early '70s Manta and Opel GT. Apples and Oranges. "Vega... much better car than the Opel". You're kidding, right? The Vega was the BIC lighter of cars. When it ran out of fuel, it should have been parked at the curb and abandoned. Uncomfortable, the most wrong-headedly designed crappy motor, horrible seating position. Vega and most of the H-Specials synonomous with POS. The only H-Special I liked as a new car was the version of the Monza V8 sold in California: mandatory 350 V8 with TurboHydramatic. In a straight line, it was OK. Your sales experience and mine about the 1970's Opels could not be more different. In the L.A. area, the Manta (and the Mercury Capri)competed against each other, and both sold well. As I mentioned before, the Opel GT came out at the same time as the Datsun 240-Z and Porsche 914 1.7, and all three cars had waiting lists in order to meet demand. They stopped importing GT's because Opel wouldn;t redesign it to meet later bumper and emissions requirements, and Opel stopped building the GT in 1974. Manta imports stopped after 1975 for emissions reasons, and because of the exchange rate making them too expensive to sell.
My ideas about the Opel are those of a young enthusiast reading road tests when the cars were new. The styling criticsm is simply my own perspective. The things had tiny wheels, a narrow track, and much less power than the Vega. Experience with the Vega is the basis for my comments. In 1973, my wife to be bought a '74 Vega, against my advice. I bought a company used '73 Cutlass S around the same time. We both paid $3,000, give or take. The Vega was a good car until it rusted apart. My wife was happy with it. A red coupe with black interior and 4 speed. First the fenders rusted through. I replaced them with free fenders Chevrolet provided, found a rust free used hatch lid, and repainted the car. It looked almost brand new when I dumped it for $500. The exhaust attaching points rusted off and I could hardly find anything to even wire it back up! You are right that the engine was a poor design, iron head and aluminum block, but it performed better than the Opel, it did have a larger displacement, and had very much higher sales. Vega was the first corporate project center car in GM history, and it was a failure on many fronts. We in the divisions knew how to make cars and money, particularly at Oldsmobile. I put 40k on the Cutlass and sold it for $2,500!