Used Car of the Day: Opel GT Barn Find
Have you ever wondered what is hidden in the barns you pass whenever you drive in a rural area? I have. I mean, OK, sure, most are probably just housing farm implements and random stuff. But sometimes you find an old European car. Or two.
Hey, beats a dead body.
Today's UCOTD comes to us from Coal Valley, Illinois (just outside the Quad Cities). There's not a lot of information here, but someone willing to dig into a project could do some research on these three Opels.
The original poster tells us one has a full body and another is a shell from the firewall back. He or she also goes into some detail about the cars' states of being (both need a fair bit of work, suffice it to say) and tells us the mileage appears to be low and the odometers not rolled back. Also, the owner is 85 and requests a "fair price".
Someone with both time and money on their hands could have a lot of fun with these.
[Images: Seller]
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Tim Healey grew up around the auto-parts business and has always had a love for cars — his parents joke his first word was “‘Vette”. Despite this, he wanted to pursue a career in sports writing but he ended up falling semi-accidentally into the automotive-journalism industry, first at Consumer Guide Automotive and later at Web2Carz.com. He also worked as an industry analyst at Mintel Group and freelanced for About.com, CarFax, Vehix.com, High Gear Media, Torque News, FutureCar.com, Cars.com, among others, and of course Vertical Scope sites such as AutoGuide.com, Off-Road.com, and HybridCars.com. He’s an urbanite and as such, doesn’t need a daily driver, but if he had one, it would be compact, sporty, and have a manual transmission.
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I agree with one of the forum posters that the grey one looks like a fiberglass shell. There were (rare) Opel GT funny car bodies. An Opel GT FC was featured on a couple of episodes of "Faster With Finnegan".
There was something to recommend the Opel GT / Mantas of the early/mid 1970s, at least in comparison to the other econojunk of the era.
The wagon variant of these was the first car I ever drove completely flat out. Made at least 90 mph and actually felt controllable at that speed.