Wish the Lotus Carlton was given a worthy successor? Well, it very nearly did. Here's the story behind the Opel Omega V8 that so nearly made production –
may be a hero car today, but it was not an unqualified success in its time. Its bespoke engineering was expensive, not least the engine rebuild that gave it new pistons, conrods and crank plus a pair of turbochargers. The car’s overall assembly process was complicated, too, involving completed Carlton 3000GSis being shipped from Germany to the UK socould dismantle them, rework their straight sixes, snip out their wheelarches, widen their transmission tunnels, and give them a retrim.
In Germany, however, Opel shifted more Lotus Omegas and attracted fewer negative headlines, which might explain why the company had an appetite for a higher performance version of the new-generation Omega launched in 1994. What it didn’t want was the complexity and expense of the controversial Lotus. So, rather than creating a made-to-measure modified engine, Opel went to GM’s global parts cupboard, pulled out an off-the-shelf 5.