Well my Prawny bard, the days of quirky French motoring have come to an end; to be replaced by a car named after the Latin word for star - Astra.
Let me make one thing perfectly clear up front the Astra is not, I repeat not, a funky car. Is most definitely however, in the words of Luke Hines (VX Racing 2004) a car that came to "kick ass and blow bubble gum, but I'm all out of bubblegum". The only option left then was to kick ass and I can assure you the car did quite a lot of that. Everything the car touched in its own right it blew to the kerb. Not a funky car but literally a champion of its domain.
While funkyness may not be a virtue, the car without a doubt screams General Motors. The design cues came from the 78 Rekord which became VB Commodore here in Oz, the boot line with its characteristic lights was passed down from the 1986 WRC surprise package... the Opel Kadett/Vauxhall Astra and then stolen by everyone else (most notably the last model of the Mazda 323 which uses literally the same Bosch rear light cluster). The actual design itself comes from the studio of Bertone. Famous for other such cars like the Lamborghini Muira and Lancia Stratos, both of which like the Astra won the European Car of the Year Award.
The engine has its roots all the way back in JB Camira, good old Family 2. In fact most of the production units (1.8L, 2.0L) were actually produced in Elizabeth, South Australia. If there's one thing to be said about the Australian motor industry it's that it doesn't produce crap. Automotive produce from this wide brown land can be made to be driven into the ground virtually forever and usually only the cancer of rust will finally kill the cars.
As for where it is built? I have no idea. The car could have come from Belguim or the UK or Italy, the only way of knowing is to actually look at the VIN. Admittedly GM had a reputation for building cheap motor cars, and in savvy Europe the way they sought to beat this image was to go motor racing and did they ever.
This is the short list of titles that the plucky Astra won:
1998 British Rally Championship - Manufacturers
1999 British Rally Championship - Manufacturers
2000 British Rally Championship - Manufacturers
1998 Irish Rally Championship - Manufacturers
2000 Irish Rally Championship - Manufacturers
1998 European Rally Championship - Manufacturers
1999 European Rally Championship - Manufacturers
2000 European Rally Championship - Manufacturers
2001 BTCC Champion - Jason Plato
2002 BTCC Champion - James Thompson
2003 BTCC Champion - Yvan Muller
2004 BTCC Champion - James Thompson
2001 BTCC Teams Championship
2002 BTCC Teams Championship
2003 BTCC Teams Championship
2004 BTCC Teams Championship
2002 BTCC - Manufacturers
2003 BTCC - Manufacturers
2004 BTCC - Manufacturers
That's quite a record for anyone to argue against. Admittedly that doesn't include the nearly two dozen race wins it clocked up in the DTM in V8 guise, nor the 18 victories in the South African Thundersports series. The car stole more than just the odd point away from the full-time WRC competitors as a 2WD kit car.
The car itself feels dead in the steering (which is normal for most cars these days - why is that?) and it's a lottery to see if you get one with the dicky reverse gear locky thing that you have to pull up before you can pull the stick across (NB: I got stuck at a services in an Astra on the A3 near Guildford just outside the M25 and couldn't work this thing out for nearly 25 minutes) but ultimately it tracks true and will tend to sit up on the motorway except if the air-con is on.
Ergonomically it's all you'd expect from an Opel, it's literally perfect. Just like the VB-VL Commodore, GM Germany thought long and hard before putting anything in the console. German efficiency comes to hand at every point and apart from trim, the general layout never varied. Grey plastic abounds, which does tend to make you forget which colour of car you're in. In closing, the car aint a funky machine, it's a Eurobox but one that was so perfectly put together that quite frankly the record speaks for itself. There's nothing that can be argued against there and if the new "me too" Astra (that tries so desperately to look like a Peugeot 307) wants to displace the old Annie Astra, then it'll have to more than just "kick ass and blow bubble gum" to upstage its departing sibling.
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