Restomod of the week: Retropower’s Opel GT

It’s a fully restored and improved Opel GT. The original car was launched in 1968 and enjoyed a five-year production run that saw more than 100,000 examples sold.

The base-spec car was offered with a 1.1-litre, inline four-cylinder engine developing 66bhp, while a more powerful 1.9-litre, camshaft-in-head engine produced 101bhp. This fell to 82bhp half way through the car’s lifecycle when Opel was forced to modify it because of emissions regulations at the time. Classic car, modern-day problems.

The front mid-engined, rear-wheel drive Opel GT had a four-speed manual gearbox as standard, but you could get a three-speed auto on 1.9-litre models. There was no Vauxhall-badged alternative in the UK, so all the surviving GTs from this era are left-hand drive.

Images: Damian Hock

A company called Retropower, which is based in Leicestershire. It was established by brothers Nathaniel and Callum Seviour, who TG met a few months ago for a very special, ultra-cool tour of the firm’s base and its ongoing projects.

Their recent stuff includes a Chevrolet Camaro, an Alfa Romeo GT Junior, a Lancia Stratos and a Mercedes W111. A pretty eclectic mix, then.

Retropower was even entrusted with restoring a Mk1 Ford Escort for none other than Gordon Murray not so long ago. The legendary McLaren F1 and GMA T.50 designer said he couldn’t fault the finished product: it’s hard to imagine higher praise than that.

According to Retropower, the owner of the GT initially came in for a respray of his home-built car, but that request was upgraded to the full monty when a family member, er, crashed it. A new GT was sourced and bought, and Retropower set to work on restoring it to its former glory. And then some…

The new shell needed a lot of fixing, with bent sills and structural fractures suggesting that the car had been in an accident of its own at some point. The upgraded engine - a ‘Redtop’ C20XE developed by Cosworth in the late Eighties - slotted into the GT’s tiny body relatively easily, but the biggest challenge was packaging vital ancillaries such as the exhaust manifold and individual throttle bodies into the vehicle.

The suspension was heavily reworked, with coilover and custom springs added to the fronts and rears respectively, and a compression strut thrown in for good measure.

On the outside, the body was finished in Ferrari Scuderia Red and the front and rear bumpers were stripped off. Self-illuminating number plates are a modern touch.

Apparently, the owner hasn’t ruled out coming back for independent rear suspension and a turbo in the future.

Just the one. Retropower only deals in one-off projects, preferring to work on as many fascinating cars as possible, despite there being more money in repeat projects so often conducted by other restomod specialists.

Retropower doesn’t say, although the engine has been extensively used in various forms of motorsport over the years. Depending on what degree it’s been tuned, it should be pretty nifty.

The original car was said to achieve 0-60mph in 10.8secs, with a top speed of 113mph. So you’d expect this restomod version to improve on those numbers.

Again, Retropower has kept that information under wraps. As it specialises in one-offs it doesn’t have a go-to price sheet, instead producing bespoke quotes for its customers depending on what they want done to whichever model they’ve brought into the workshop.

But if you need to source a classic car, find new parts, meticulously plan any upgrades and fund the many months of work it can take for an expert team to bring everything together, you’ll probably need extremely voluminous pockets to commission a Retropower project of your own. So start saving.

Like all of Retropower’s projects, this restomod Opel GT isn’t just a ground-up refurbishment, it’s a passion project. The team goes to great lengths to ensure that the finished car drives and handles in a way that will be adored by the owner when the keys are handed back.

For those lucky customers, the end result is a machine that gives them the kind of buzz anyone who loves cars and driving will know all too well.

This kind of passion should be revered.

When the Opel GT was launched, the pop-up headlights were novel in that they’d barrel-roll into position rather than rise up out of the bodywork in the ‘conventional’ manner. They were operated by a lever on the centre console just beyond the gear stick.

Retropower has altered the set-up on this restomod so that the headlights are now controlled electronically, preserving the party trick for years to come. Hooray!