The new record from 1960 - and how it was stretched
02/22/2013
Yes, those were the days when Opel created enthusiasm among the buying public with a new record. And the sales brochure published at the launch never tired of praising the design efforts of the Opel studio. That was in August 1960, when the P2 was presented in the upper mid-size class.
"Good stylists are like bold architects", it was written, or "they are artists and technicians in one". The aim was "the artistically simple, the simply unaffected". The result was commented on as "more beautiful than ever, time-conscious in its lines, unaffected, refined, improved, surpassing its own previous performance - in a valid form of the time, in which technology and beauty have become a classic unity".
This is how the customer's mind and feeling should speak for the new Opel, and the Opel makers were not entirely wrong with this wish. In the end, 556,691 customers opted for the appealing Opel by February 1963.
Obviously, the brochure makers wanted to give the styling a little extra help. The illustrations clearly show the Opel more elongated than the photographic documentation.
The brochure for the 1960 Opel Rekord can of course be found in the Zwischengas archive, as can contemporary test reports.
