Opel Kadett Gassers

The Mullins and Buddo car was awsome. They were at Edgewater all the time. Ohio was ....is...the gasser state.

 

Copied from the internet.

 

The Corvette is still owned by the same guy today the Opel is lost. National Trail Raceway early 70's.

 

Id love to build a Kadett. The Jr Thompson car was a bracket car here in NE Ohio for a long time running Pro Gas out at Thompson in the late 70's, early 80's.

 

What??? No Space Kadet?
Martin? Are you out there?

 

GREAT STORY.... too bad you didn't come up with the $$$$.

Right around that same time is when both the drag racing & street scene started to die off. Thanks to the EPA restrictions killing off the "factory built muscle cars", closing of drag strips, etc, etc.

A person could buy up all kinds of high performance cars & drag cars really CHEAP!!! Wish I could have known back then what I know now.

Recall those great muscle cars, etc of days gone by.... for many of us they were our "daily drivers".... used them in the Winter.

Stop & think .... by 1976 muscle cars of the sixties '70's were getting to be just "old cars". Plus with the death of the muscle cars less & less cars went to the drag strip and drag strips everywhere starting closing.

"Those were the days my friends.... we thought they'd NEVER END.... But they did!!!!

A sad commentary!!!!!

 

Love those late 60's Opels in the Kadett or the GT! But I'd really love to find one of the late 40's Opel Olympias!! Or the British version known as a Vauxhall.

 

Congrats on the new car Dave! It's pretty badass. I'll have to dig through our photos now and see if we have any of Opels for ya. Cant wait for Bowling Green! You gotta bring this one out to the Gold Cup in Buffalo now... haha Still want to come see the Willys Coupe one of these days too!

 

What happened to the "Opel Sauce" car? It was green and had a bbc blown, flip up body I think. Lippy

 

as i mentioned earlier, it'd be easier to find a moskvich, in post-soviet countries. they never made the tudors, though
aaand i've added the moskvich to my to-photoshop list

edit: oh, you're from the states, nevermind then. english-sized-cars in avatars always make me think its a user from europe

 

Here is a couple more....

 

Curt LaShure's J/Gas Opel. Powered by a six cylinder Chevy.

From Utica Rome back in the 70's.

 

Great car ! Proves patience and persistence pays off . Good luck with it .

 

Its a kind of strange to think that you have old Opels back there too.I guess GM has something to do with it...
My late granma was one of the first trained female gardeners in this country and she had 69' Rekord STW.She used to haul vegetables to the market or stores with that back in the days.

 

Well like all other opels they rusted away

Wife have one 69 ralley hard to find parts no reproduction
i found 2 front turn signals in Austria a tail light glass and
windshield rubber in finland all N.O.S
and a friend make fiberglass parts and had moulds for front
fenders and made a mould of my hood

 

The Space Kadette seems to feature some characteristics that it be a fuel burner. Yeah, I see the shoe polish inscribing F/Gas but it has zoomies and it appears that the driver is donned in full fire suit and mask.

 

Seems this thread is going to be the official Opel gasser thread, guess I will share a few more pictures of Jr Thompson's Opel Kadett.

 

Few more of Jr Thompson.

 

Sweet Opel you got there Dave.

Here's some more.

 

Another one the the mix.

 

Clark and Clark, very nice looking Kadett gasser.

 

Yes it is..... looks like they may have used "lace" on the top panels of the sides.

With lots of hot rodders getting back into nostalgia gassers, muscle cars, etc I am surprised not many of the panel & cobweb/lace paint jobs that were so popular back "when" haven't also made it back on gassers, drag cars, etc today.....




They weren't that bad where they????

 

Yep, good old USA!
But they did make two door Moskvich cars!

 

Probably 'cause it was so ugly back then, and still is!

 

That's what I was thinking..... I did like cobwebing on certain cars.


Do you remember when people just used "pin striping" to "outline" each section/panel????

 

Do I remember! My first '57 Chevy I had was original two tone green and I had the panels pinstripe outlined in a bright green! Looked great back then, but I wouldn't replicate it today!

 

My favorite body style of the "late model" gassers! Nice score, love the tin work.

 

For a brief time I had "orange cobweb" SS stripes painted on the hood of my BLACK '67 Camaro. It was a "trendy" look that got quite a bit of looks back then. But like you already said "I wouldn't replicate it today!"

Shortly after that I stripped the Camaro down to bare metal and painted it GM Mojave Gold.



A color I WOULD USE again today.....

 

Nice collection of Opels racing in the faster classes. Dave Mason's blown green Opel (upper middle shot) was the former Norm Paddock car from 68. Paddock was one of the more prominant guys who really pushed the use of the Opel shell, both coupe and GT version. I liked the cobwebbing, lace, frosted paint effects from the 60's to early 70's. But it is a period style approach to painting cars and should only be applied to those racers that are being built to replicate that era. The Opels body shape leant towards a lot of wild uncontrolled creativity when it came to paint design.

I think the Grove Bros A/Gas Opel won the big Midwest Gas Coupe and Sedan Championships in 1970. What a ride it must have been to keep that little coupe straight as you mash the throttle on the 426 Hemi.

 

Opels were available in the fifties too. I've even seen 50ies ones in a Wisconsin junkyard myself. A friend of mine brought a '58 back to Germany recently.