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Opel Manta 'Reloaded' Render Needs a Prepped Quarter-Mile Dragstrip to Fulfill Its Dreams

Although it's a staple of American car culture, no one should disregard the love of Europeans professed for quarter-mile drag racing. The fans are pretty bonkers up north in Sweden, and there's even an FIA European Drag Racing Championship, in case you didn't know.
Opel Manta Reloaded dragster rendering by richter.cgi 11 photos
Photo: richter.cgi / Instagram
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But few people would dare start modifying the most casual European rides – such as old-school Volvo wagons – into mad quarter-mile dragstrip monsters. There have been such disparate examples over the years, but of course, the real world is two steps behind the imaginative realm of digital car content creators.

Over there, Andreas Richter, a virtual artist from Berlin, Germany, formerly known as ar. visual_ (now richter.cgi) on social media, is currently obsessed with dragsters and funny cars as he wants to "bring back the '80s babe, at least (in terms of) peak analog technology and design." Thus, here is his personal answer to the calling, an Opel Manta 'Reloaded.'

Interestingly, it goes against the OEM vision where Stellantis subsidiary Opel has decided the Manta could one day come back as a restomod with zero emissions. The Manta ElektroMOD is an excellent piece of advice for what EVs should represent when trying to connect with classic car aficionados – a combination of neat retro styling with the absolute best of modern battery-powered car technology.

Sure, it doesn't break the eight-second barrier like the Tesla Model S Plaid, as the prototype might not even dream of ever seeing the left or right lane of a quarter-mile dragstrip. Thus, maybe the virtual Opel Manta 'Reloaded' can do the trick for racing fans. Most likely, it will, though you also need a strong dose of the classic 'suspension of disbelief' in this virtual case. After all, the RWD sports car looks like a coupe work of art that just exited a museum, or the latest SEMA Show, for that matter.

And it comes complete with lots of crazy details, including a nice set of velocity stacks for the vintage carburetors set in unusual places, a decidedly slammed atmosphere focused on the black wheels clad in racing-spec Toyo Tires, a narrow wheel track width, especially at the rear, to make way for the absurdly broad rubber, plus an admirable widebody ethos. Oh, and let us remember the burgundy shade or the quad-pipe lateral assembly! Too bad this is all just wishful thinking, as we would have loved to see this monster perform a wheelie or two at the track before engaging in glorious combat with a Tesla Model S Plaid or a 2023 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon 170!

By the way, this is not the only mind-boggling idea from this pixel master. As such, just for our guilty viewing pleasure, second below, we have embedded the author's recent midsummer night's dream of a Nissan Skyline R31 that was transformed into a GT-R wannabe, as well as an NFS-style cabriolet! Cool, right?





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About the author: Aurel Niculescu
Aurel Niculescu profile photo

Aurel has aimed high all his life (literally, at 16 he was flying gliders all by himself) so in 2006 he switched careers and got hired as a writer at his favorite magazine. Since then, his work has been published both by print and online outlets, most recently right here, on autoevolution.
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