So my friend Alex and I have started an ad-hoc club for Opel Kadetts - by which I mean we have three of them between us now, and we don't know anyone else who's willing to take the plunge.
Let me back up a bit. Alex and I both joined up with Black Iron Racing, our Lemons team, around the same time in 2012. Before getting involved with us and our silly BMWs, Alex campaigned the Geo Metro Gnome with storied success in the series. Prior to that, he had enjoyed all manner of vintage Euro stuff on the street, including an Opel Kadett Rallye. Alex had used the Rallye as its name suggested, in the California Melee vintage car rally where I believe he first met Jay Lamm, Lemons Chief Perp. I had no prior knowledge of the Opel affliction until the Buttonwillow race last fall when we saw a 1967 Kadett "Kiemencoupe" (gills coupe) that had been entered by an ambitious Angeleno, a guy who rescued this forgotten 54hp economy car, revived it, and built it into something that would pass tech. He drove it to the race, turned hundreds of laps, won the Organizer's Choice, and then drove it home. Alex and I were both smitten with this little thing despite the stately processional pace it had around the racetrack, but he really wanted it. After a few months of continuous contact with the builder/owner he worked out a deal to buy the Opel early this year (2019). Thus Black Iron Racing was made a 2-car team, with the balls-out E36 V8 camper fighting for the overall win on one end of the spectrum, and this elegant little fastback coupé tugging at heartstrings for the IOE in Class C on the other.
I signed up to help sort out the car before our maiden race with it at Sonoma in March 2019, which turned out to be pretty rewarding, and not super stressful. With Alex as the mastermind and several others in our shared workshop as his mechanical sandwich artists, the "Opile" was upgraded with an alternator, an aluminum radiator, front suspension tweaks (it had previously been hit hard), a scratch-built panhard rod in the rear, spec E30 wheels, transmission swap to one we suspected was in slightly better condition than the one with the blown input bearing, cage improvements, an oil cooler, tweaks to the driving position, radio, harnesses, and seat, and of course...lots and lots of carb tuning. The Opile is still street legal so we drove it up to the Angeles Crest area for a public road test session, which was great fun. The goal for Sonoma was to win Class C or bust. We had a crack 4-person team consisting of Alex, me, my wife (who has a few trackdays and one previous Lemons race on her resume) and Bitter Dan from Eyesore racing. We went for a one-stop stragety - a bold move for an 8-hour session - but it worked! Both days we only stopped once for driver change & refueling. My wife ended up driving for nearly 4 hours in her stint, and the rest of us were all over 3 hours. There was one mechanical issue, a chafed & leaking oil cooler hose which was starting to starve the engine in right turns. That was a quick fix but to our dismay there was a hellafast (in comparison) totally stock 1st-gen Honda CR-V that handed our asses to us in class C, so we had no chance of winning that prize. But - we managed to eke out a few more laps than the other weirdo, a Bitter SC (!) to end up winning the IOE and went home with even bigger smiles on our faces, and a free entry to the next race to boot!
Here's a nice writeup on the car and our first race with it: https://24hoursoflemons.com/blog/cheap-race-car-build-winning-lemons-with-55-horsepower/
In the ensuing months Alex continued his rigorous race development program, fully going through the cylinder head and carburetion situations to get the little Opile into fighting shape for its next big appearance, which will be Buttonwillow again this fall. We can go into all the detals but suffice it to say it's now making 60hp at the wheels so probably a good 70bhp at the flywheel, which is extremely noticable from the driver's seat. On paper this little 1.1L pushrod four has none of the attributes of a good engine, but when you start playing around with it you discover it has a really playful character and wants to rev and almost feels sporty. With a few more handling tweaks to get it to stop pushing in steady-state cornering I'm feeling pretty good that we can hurt some feelings in the next race.
Meanwhile, Alex being a cinematographer and on a non-traditional work schedule, he's been trolling ebay for Opel stuff apparently. So I get an email from him one day while I'm at work, which reads "WOULD DAILY!" and contains a link to a nice looking little red '67 Kiemencoupe on eBay for $1250 buy it now, or make offer. Geez. So we go back and forth about what a great deal this could be, and a few days passes. He texts me saying "I'm having a really hard time not buying that Opel" to which I think, "oh man, maybe I need to buy that!" and I proceed to...make offer. The seller calls me to work out whether I'm a scammer or not, and upon satisfying the "real dude interested in this weird old car" criteria, my offer is accepted and now I have to figure out how to get a barn-find Opel Kadett from Phoenix to LA. Not a huge deal, but then we talk some more, and oh! There are loads of parts he's throwing in with the car. And OH! There's a parts car too! Another '67 Kiemencoupe, but this one's a Rallye. It's rough but complete. I can't commit to buying two of these things but I forward the photos to Alex and he's down, immediately. Full circle back to his old rally Rallye and now we have a trove of parts coming that will no doubt help the race program. And suddenly I'm adding car no. 11 to my personal fleet...oh man.
The Rallye:
When it was a matter of transporting one car across the desert, I had a plan, no worries. We would drive out in my Land Crusher and tow it home. But two of them, loaded with parts... and only one tow vehicle between us. Our box truck is broken, and both of our trailers just got stolen from our shop parking lot. The shop is in unicorporated LA county between Compton and Carson, and there is a crime...situation there. Nothing ever too serious. Some guys flipping a car on its roof in the street, then jumping out and running away. Some joyride vehicle thefts. A few gunpoint robbery weed sale scams in our parking lot. You know, normal stuff. Anyway I was trying to work out a plan for transporting 2 dead Opels, when the seller texted me with the solution - he knows a Swedish ex-pro hockey player who exports classic cars back to the motherland and moonlights as a car transport trucker. $650 for both of them delivered to our doorstep. Sold!
We're they racing these in Germany in the late 60s ?, 
