Fresh from its Geneva unveiling; what you’re looking at here isn’t just a piece of go-faster automotive fluff with some naff wings and garish spoilers to weigh it down. What you’re looking at is something more akin to a purpose-built racing car that’s going to have to reluctantly surrender itself back to street legal requirements.
This is the Opel Astra OPC Extreme and while it’s still only a ‘design showcase,’ it will make an official public debut next month in Geneva – making the RenaultSport Megane RB8 pee its pants in the process we assume. The OPC Extreme will enjoy a low-volume production run and Opel say it’ll be the fastest street-legal Astra ever produced in-house.
But then it kind of would do, because the OPC Extreme will be a direct descendant of the Nurburgring Endurance Championship (VLN) racecar: the Astra OPC Cup, with carbon fibre components, an integrated safety structure, full race seats and six-point safety harnesses.
The hottest Opel-built 2.0-litre direct-injection turbocharged petrol engine is good for 225 kW of power and 415 Nm of torque; and promises performance figures of 0-100 km/h in less than 6-seconds, a top speed on the high side of 250 km/h. Let’s just hope they’ve shoehorned a proper gearbox in the middle of it to grapple with that Extreme power output.
