A few weeks ago when writing about the Borgward Isabella, I referred to my childhood holidays in Germany to visit family, and my seeing so many cars there that were rarely seen in the UK at the time, if at all, and this week’s Prime Find is another of those cars.
1966, the year our Prime Find was built, was the year that England won the football World Cup for the first and to date only time, and was also one of the years in which we made our biennial trip to visit my mother’s family near the city of Ulm, famous for having the world’s tallest church spire and for being the birthplace of Albert Einstein. That year we drove there in my father’s Sunbeam Rapier Mk III, a car that my mother had disapproved of when he came home with it one day (she was not consulted, since she couldn’t drive – that was my father’s reasoning) as it only had two doors and we were a family of four. I thought it was really cool – in dark green with a light green flash down the sides, small fins at the back, and a pillarless profile (not that I knew the word “pillarless” at the time – I was nine), and despite it only having two doors, it ferried half my primary school football team to school matches, the other half squeezing into our sports teacher’s Austin Cambridge.
On that particular trip, we travelled in convoy with some friends of my parents, in their Morris Traveller. They were unused to Germany’s high-speed autobahns and their Moggie wasn’t exactly lightning fast anyway, so my father frequently had to slow down and wait for them to catch up, and one of the many cars that used to pass us was the Opel Rekord.
The Rekord was a car I always liked; the first ones I remembered were the P2’s, with their wide grilles and strakes down the sides. The P2 was preceded by the original Opel Olympia Rekord, introduced in 1953, followed by the Rekord P1 and then the P2.
The successor to the P2 was not, as you might have expected, the P3, but the Rekord A, built from 1963 to 1965, and this in turn was followed quite logically by the Rekord B, and that race through the history of the Opel Rekord brings us very quickly to our Prime Find for this week, a 1966 Rekord B, the rarest of Rekords.
The Opel Rekord A
By the time of the launch of the B, the Rekord was a well-established model in the Opel range, the other cars around it being the Kadett, Kapitän, Admiral and Diplomat.
Opel’s early 1965 model line-up
The B was the shortest-lived of all the Rekord variants, lasting less than a year from August 1965 to July the following year. It was really only intended to be an interim model. Opel had originally intended launching a new generation of engines in an all-new Rekord, but while the new engines were ready in time, the rest of the car was not, so the Rekord A was updated with some references to the forthcoming model, including rectangular headlights and similar chrome decoration, but while the engines were new, the Rekord B was essentially an A in all but its letter of the alphabet.
The Rekord B was offered as a two-door saloon (remember those?), coupé and three-door estate, all providing more than enough space for four adults and their luggage. Engines were a new generation of units , replacing a 30-year-old design, and featuring a so-called “camshaft-in-head” which enabled a lower bonnet-line, instead of tilting the engine that other designs used for the same effect.
The four-cylinder engines that were offered came in three sizes – 1492cc, 1698cc and 1897cc, pumping out 60, 75 and 90bhp respectively, and a 100bhp six-cylinder version was also available, with a capacity of 2.6-litres, but unlike the modern four-cylinder powerplants, this engine dated back to 1937, and although it was more powerful, it’s extra weight meant that it didn’t offer a significant performance advantage over the newer, smaller engines.
In fact, top speeds for the Rekord B ranged from 133km/h for the 1.5-litre car, through 150, 160 and 162km/h for the four-cylinder cars, with the heavier 2.6-litre six reaching just a few km/h more, at 168.
Intriguingly, buyers of the saloon and estate models were given a choice of three or four-speed steering column mounted gearchanges, but coupé buyers were given a four-speed floor-mounted change, and this was the first Rekord to be offered with an automatic option, but only on the larger-engined models.
Despite being manufactured for only ten months, the Rekord B was a significant sales success, with 296,527 produced. It’s main rival at the time was Ford’s Taunus 17M range – our esteemed International Editor wrote about this car a few months back – but it’s sales of 710,059 examples over a three-year period meant it didn’t threaten the Rekord in the sales charts. The C, however, went on to become an even bigger sales success, so the company obviously made the right decision to cut short the B’s production run.
So we come to “our” car, a 1966 Rekord B 2-door saloon in white, and with an intriguing history. It’s on sale in The Netherlands, and has spent over 40 years in the showroom of a Dutch Opel dealer. It’s claimed to be very original, having had no welding or restoration work, and shows a recorded – and not implausible but unverifiable – 15,552km on the odometer. It was, however, given a new coat of paint in its original colour in 2019, so the car looks very smart indeed. The interior hasn’t had any work at all, and shows a lovely patina on it’s blue vinyl-upholstered bench seats.
Effectively a bridge between the Rekord A and the Rekord C – introduced late in 1966 – the B is an unusual car in that it combined elements of old and new models yet has a distinct identity of its own.
I love the long 2-door look, its clean and uncluttered lines, and especially the dual round tail-lights, a style which Opel would use again on the Opel GT and Manta A, but never featured on an Opel Rekord again.
This particular Rekord, because of its low mileage and original condition, is relatively expensive for a B at €19,995 (£17,914 as I write), so near the top end of our usual budget. However, it is an unusual car, even in its native market, and in the UK it’s not clear how many there are, if any at all, although Rekord’s in general are pretty scarce, with just 27 of all kinds licensed for the road here. It is of course LHD, but if you really want a mid-sixties Rekord, particularly one from such a specific period of Opel’s history. that won’t matter to you.
Perhaps the only downside is that it has the smallest available engine, the 1.5-litre, but while it’s by no means a fast car, it will still keep up with today’s traffic, except perhaps on the motorway. Having said all that, no-one is going to buy this Rekord for its performance, but rather, for its condition and its rarity.
As is our usual practice, we have borrowed a few photos from the dealer website – there are many – and of course, if you’re interested, we recommend arranging prior inspection. You can see the full dealer advert here.
With our Saturday instalment of Prime Find of the Week, we’re offering our services to the classic car community, by passing on our favourite classic car for sale from the week that passed. This top-tip might help a first-time-buyer to own his first classic, or it could even be the perfect motivation for a multiple-classic-car-owner to expand his garage with something different. We’ll let us be inspired by anything from a cheap project to a stunning concours exotic, and hope that you will do the same.
Just remember – Any Classic is Better than No Classic! We obviously invite our readers to help prospective buyers with your views and maybe even experiences of any given model we feature. Further to that, if you stumble across a classic which you feel we ought to feature as Prime Find of the Week, then please send us a link to primefindoftheweek@viaretro.co.uk