Seen at my hometown car show, which is coming up again in exactly a month and a day.
Here’s the frontside:
8 thoughts on “Car Photo of the Day: Name that car.”
Comments are closed.
 goolsbee.org, serving useless content from an undisclosed location since 1997
Seen at my hometown car show, which is coming up again in exactly a month and a day.
Here’s the frontside:
Comments are closed.
Opel Manta?
Definitely a Manta. Looks like a post-1973 US spec model with those rubberized bumpers. Very nice wheels, too!
Indeed it is.
Ironically the first site I visited today after posting this was The Truth About Cars (see blogroll upper right) and sure enough they have one of Paul Niedermeyer’s excellent “curbside classics” about the Manta. Great minds think alike I guess. 😉
I had to photograph it, as it was one of maybe a half-dozen non-domestic cars presented that year. If I recall there was one VW, one Porsche, one Datsun, this Opel, my Jaguar, and a Sunbeam Tiger. This out of maybe two hundred cars… an odd group for sure. I’d have expected more Porsches, and at least something Italian. Among the same old rods and muscle there were a few real domestic treasures though. I’ll report again in early June what shows up this year.
Pleasant, pretty bulletproof cars: The 1900 Opel engine was not very tuneable, but would, with proper maintenance, god 100K+ back in the day when that was sayin’ sumfin. It had the same gearbox as a Vega…which was the one part of a Vega that WAS good!
I still think the car’s styling is near perfect, especially the nose (pre-big bumpered ones looked even better).
If I could find a good one, I’d put a rotor motor in it and cruise away!
I thought at first glance it was a Mazda RX2 coupe that had been ‘done up’ in the way only the Japanese can do…. don’t think we ever had this Opel in NZ
Jerome
I thinks it’s an Opel Manta Rallye to be more precise.
My Opel stories. My college roomate’s brother had a Manta that he lumped with a 307 V8. Quite impressive. The hood came off one day at 110 MPH and flew clean overhead and landed on the road behind him. The car and driver survived the event but the hood, er bonnet, was rather worse for wear after being run over several times but the time got back to retrieve it.
These were pretty rare in the 80s, yet I actually witnessed a head-on crash between 2 Mantas on the RIT campus. Fortunately it was a rather low speed collision and there wasn’t a whole lot of damage.
Oh, yeah we had an Opel Cadet when I was a kid.
— Mark
Ewww..the grafted-on hood scoop really messes up what otherwise are near-perfect lines.