Junkyard Gem: 1971 Opel GT

Beginning in the late 1950s, General Motors made a serious push to sell cars made by its European subsidiaries in the United States. American Pontiac dealers got the Vauxhall Victor from the United Kingdom, while Buick dealers received the Opel Olympia from West Germany. Opel sales here became reasonably strong during the 1960s, and one of the most interesting Opels of all showed up in the United States as a 1969 model: the GT two-seat sports car. Here's a faded but still recognizable red GT found in a Northern California car graveyard recently.

The Opel GT came out of a period of inspired GM designs that led to the Pontiac XP-833 Banshee and C3 Chevrolet Corvette; its most important styling influence was the Chevrolet Corvair Monza GT prototype of 1962. It was sold here for the 1969 through 1969 model years and was considered something of a mini-Corvette, sold alongside the mini-Camaro Opel Manta.

The GT looked radical, but it shared its chassis design and running gear with the Opel Kadett (albeit with the engine moved nearly 16" to the rear). The Kadett connection made it cheap to build, and the MSRP for the 1971 GT was $3,339 (about $26,358 in 2024 dollars).

The GT was powered by a cam-in-head 1.9-liter straight-four engine, rated at 90 horsepower and 111 pound-feet.

The cam-in-head design was something of a mashup between an overhead-valve rig (with the camshaft in the engine block and actuating the valves via pushrods up into the cylinder head) and an overhead-cam design (with the camshaft in the cylinder head and directly actuating the valves). As this photograph shows with great clarity, the camshaft in a cam-in-head engine lives in the cylinder head but off to the side of the valves, actuating them with lifters shoving directly against good old pushrod-style rocker arms.

The cam-in-head engine proved to be something of an evolutionary dead end, although Ford used its cam-in-head CVH straight-four in the U.S.-market Focus all the way through 2004.

A four-speed manual transmission was standard equipment. A three-speed automatic was available as a $196 option ($1,547 after inflation).

The GT had no decklid, which proved annoying in the real world. There was a carpeted area for cargo behind the rear seats.

The hidden headlights didn't pop up, instead rotating 180° into position via a handle under the dash.

The interior in this one is largely missing, and the body is in rough shape after decades of outdoor storage. An Opel GT in nice condition is worth decent money, but battered ones still show up in American junkyards with some regularity.

There's a lot of old body filler on this car.

The original Delco-made Kadett radio is still here. There was some good music on AM radio in 1971, and we can assume that this radio played a lot of it back then.

 

Opel revived the GT name for the 2007 through 2009 model years, when an Opelized version of the Saturn Sky was sold in Europe. There was a Daewoo-badged version called the G2X sold in South Korea, too.

It wasn't for middle-aged German guys. They couldn't even get in!

Great for racing on rainy public roads.

Comes with tachometer as standard equipment.

By Murilee Martin