A German sedan with inline six. When you hear this description, the association with a product from Munich is obvious. Yet that is emphatically not the case now, because this Opel Senator from 1979 also has a six-cylinder engine under the hood!
In the case of this Senator, Opel’s top model at the time and the predecessor of the Omega, it is even a real three-liter six-cylinder engine with 150 hp. If you look up the license plate via the RDW, you will notice that it says ‘3.0 H’ behind it. However, that version of the Senator was never delivered. Given the stated power and the indication on the boot lid, we suspect that this is the S, which cost €21,914 new in the Netherlands at the time. In the Senator hierarchy, the S was below the 180 horsepower E, with the E from einspritzung. Later, even faster versions of the sedan came on the market, including the Irmscher-tuned Senator 4.0, which put out a whopping 272 horsepower. That was a tickled version (1,000 cc more capacity!) of the Senator B 3.0 24V, the successor of the A that we describe here.
You hardly ever find an Opel Senator in the wild anymore, so we are very grateful to forum user JFR for uploading this copy. This Senator is an early car with its year of construction, because the Senator was only on the market for the first time in 1978. In 1983 Opel’s top sedan received a facelift, after which the Senator B came on the market in 1987. It eventually remained in production until 1993. The Senator in question spent the first 29 years of its automobile life outside the Netherlands and was only registered in 2008. In the seven years that followed, it changed hands no fewer than four times. The current owner has held the keys since 2015.
The Opel has some rust at the front bumper and it seems to have become somewhat crispy at the wheel arches. That does not alter the fact that it is a great achievement that this now 42-year-old sedan can still be admired on the country’s roads. The red cloth interior in combination with the white exterior should be your taste, but with a three-liter six-in-line under the hood, it is undoubtedly wonderfully smooth cruising with this Senator!
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– Thanks for information from Autoweek.nl