1970 Opel GT

1970 Opel GT was owner’s first car in 1975.

When Dr. David Wolfe, now of London, Ont., was a graduate student at the University of South Florida in 1975, he had never owned a car and got around campus on a bicycle.
But pedalling is hot work in Tampa and when a nurse offered him the chance to buy her car for $600, he said yes.
That car was a 1970 Opel GT and she was the original owner. What she didn’t disclose was that at some time in the past the car had been rolled on its side – something David suspected but which wasn’t proven until he started a complete restoration in1992.
After buying the Opel he saved up for a new set of radial tires, “which gave it a whole different ride,” and found that tinkering with the car gave him “something to do when graduate school got too intense.”
David kept the car until 1980, when he moved to Canada, and his brother drove it for the next eight years. Until 1989 it was the only car David had ever owned.
“I couldn’t afford to keep it when I first came to Canada,” says the Connecticut native, “so it’s a good thing my brother took it over for a while.” (Dr. Wolfe is now RBC Chair in Children’s Mental Health at London’s CAMH Centre for Prevention Science, a professor of psychiatry and psychology at OISE/University of Toronto and editor-in-chief of the journal Child Abuse & Neglect.)
The Opel GT was designed and built by General Motors’ German subsidiary and sold in North America through Pontiac-Buick dealers. A total of 103,463 were assembled between 1968 and 1973. Because of its Stingray-inspired styling it became known as “the baby Corvette.” Like Corvettes of that era the Opel GT has pop-up headlamps, operated manually via a lever on the centre console that’s mounted near the shifter for the 4-speed manual transmission.
Unlike many of its competitors – Britain’s Lotus Europa, Canada’s Manic GT and France’s Matra – the Opel GT did not have a fibreglass body. It used all-steel unibody construction with a conventional front-engine, rear-wheel drive layout. However, the engine was mounted well back in the chassis to improve weight distribution.

Some say styling is similar to Corvettes of that era.

There was no convertible version, only a hardtop coupe, and the interior is not as tight as in most two-seat sports cars because the Opel allegedly was designed from the inside out. Like many sports cars of the time there is no external trunk lid. Storage space behind the seats is accessed from the inside.
The Opel GT came with a choice of 4-cylinder engines – a 1.1 litre or a 1.9-litre cam-in-head (CIH) unit producing 102 hp. David’s car has the bigger engine and the only modifications he made were to replace the original Solex carburetor, “which always ran rough,” with a Weber and to install electronic ignition. Although he still has the original 13-inch steel rims, the car now rides on aftermarket wire wheels.
When David first began restoration in the early ’90s, he got little help from Buick dealers, who seldom had parts for their oddball little import. But the Internet explosion has been a boon for owners of all kinds of old iron and he now gets all his parts online, mostly from www.opelgtsource.com in California.
It was completely finished two years ago, right down to it original colour – Chartreuse Yellow – although this time done in base coat/clear coat.
He gets to drive it “about 1,000 miles a year – if I’m lucky” – and says it attracts lots of attention wherever it goes.
The Opel GT was resurrected in 2007 as a two-seat convertible based on the Pontiac Solstice/Saturn Sky and was built in Wilmington, Del. until GM closed that plant in July.