The right condition on the wrong car
08/14/2022
"Very bad condition!" Excuse me? I'm so taken aback that I have to ask again. Surely I've just misheard. But I haven't. How dare that idiot on the scooter! He squeezes past all the waiting cars at the red light and tells me to roll down the window just to tell me that he doesn't like the look of my classic car. There are people ...
Well, my Opel Rekord really doesn't look like it just came off the assembly line. But for a 63-year-old, notoriously fast rusting car, it's actually still in pretty good shape. Its condition is somewhere between the "Bluesmobil" and Inspector Columbo's Peugeot. And I'm not going to change that, because that's how it tells me about its former life in Scandinavia. But since the Rekord is neither a famous movie car nor the product of an expensive southern German brand, other people just see a rotten Opel.
Klaus Kienle put it in a nutshell when he saw the black saloon: "If this were a 300 SL, people would be all over it." As a world-renowned top restorer of high-priced Mercedes-Benz classics, he knows the value of original substance, even in the case of other makes. After all, most Opel Rekord P1s have already been restored at least once. If not, they are usually completely eaten away ruins that, without generous sheet metal transplants, are only suitable as a support for young rose bushes.
But as a structurally sound, honest "four-plusser" that has never seen a welder or a spray gun, such an everyday vehicle is really rare. But not everyone recognizes this. Fortunately, more and more do. Like the nice visitor at one of last year's Older Classics, for example, who said cheerfully as she passed by: "It's nice that you've kept it so original." So there is still hope.
