"Like, an actual magazine?"
That was Lawrence Evans' reaction when, upon chatting him up in the Nurburgring tourist drive paddock, I told him what I did. And while my lede here is not just bragging on the fact that we're still putting paper in the mail 40 years after this thing started, it does serve as a good frame of reference into Lawrence's love of old-school bits of car culture, like his Vauxhall Omega.
In the US, we knew this second gen variant of the Omega as the Cadillac Catera, and it was, for the most part, awful. Sold in much of Europe as the Opel Omega, in the UK as the Vauxhall Omega and in the US as the Catera, this second-generation of GM's "V" platform was around from around 1994-2004, with the Catera coming to the us in '96 and mercifully departing after the 1999 model year.
Evans' example is a 2000 model with the X30XE 3.0-liter 24-valve V6 (L81 here in the states), hooked to the five speed transmission from the 2.5-liter variant which features shorter gear ratios than the 3.0-liter's trans. Of course, our only option in the colonies was a 4L30-E automatic in the Caddy, so a manual is an instant upgrade for the 207hp V6. The V chassis features struts in the front and semi-trailing arms in the independent rear, making the Omega somewhat like GM's tribute to the E36 BMW 3-Series, except with a 54-degree V6 in the nose and not a straight six.
Evans originally purchased the car as an ex-police car—an unmarked one, of course, so it didn't feature any add-ons like light bars or additional interior utilities. "The supply of these things has all but dried up" Evans says. "At this point, they've either been run into the ground, or the people who actually want them have gone out and snatched up all the good ones." Evans has had his car since he was in high school, and still regularly makes the 500 mile journey to the Nurburgring from his home in Oxford, UK, through the Chunnel, across France, Belgium and Germany, for a couple days of lapping. The car gets driven the whole way, of course, although Evans needs some earplugs to keep the noise inside the gutted and caged interior at safe-for-human-exposure levels.
When he's not flogging the thing around Germany's most famous track, or his home tracks in England, he's busy keeping it road worthy. The Thames Valley is obviously not known for its dry, mild climate, so keeping ahead of rust is a constant battle, and he describes the aftermarket support of the chassis as "Utter E36 M3e" which is the British way of saying "Frustratingly unsatisfactory."
Evans catalogs a lot of his work on the Omega on his YouTube channel, MODEL-101.
