Hyperleggera

1997 Opel Corsa Van

Cruising

Proof that tiny Euro­pean vans can be great fun.

Words and pic­tures: Peter Orosz

—you scream from the kitchen.

“Make that a couple!” I scream back.

Keep crunch­ing on your Spe­cial K and soon we will be swirling up a summer storm of dust and shards and flow­ers, crunch away or the milk with bog it down. The speak­ers say: More than just a leit­mo­tif / More chaotic, no relief

I hammer away on the hard­wood floors, tap­ping go go GO, and off you are with car key twirling, slic­ing at a ginkgo leaf, you drop the clutch and hit the road and while you steer, I set the stereo to eleven so Karen can shriek: tick tick tick tick tick tick TICKTICKTICK

Time is slip­ping away. We advance a block. Then another. One may ask what a hun­dred and twenty cubic inches are enough for. Whether to defeat space and time, one would need a min­i­mum of twelve cylin­ders to counter the pres­sure of bare feet stuck to a windscreen.

A sat­is­fac­tory answer is per­haps pro­vided by the remark­able kinetic energy of air mol­e­cules that hit an out­stretched palm. Give them time and they will erode the loops off your skin down to the con­nec­tive tissue.

You are a mon­ster with your brake pads, you know, two drops of oil and cease would their whine like that of a corvette run aground on coral. You enjoy per­haps the whole­sale destruc­tion of the audi­tory cortex? Enjoy per­haps metal grind­ing on metal?

We do not exit the corner on a tan­gent but rather con­tinue, the pebble-​like Nineties chas­sis has many a trick up its sleeve, it is not a coupé but is instead a truck with a trip reg­is­ter.

Imag­ine the vistas afforded by a track sus­pen­sion! Forged alu­minum wish­bones, low­ered to skin the shards of soda bot­tles, a KKK turbo could also come in handy—

“Hold on,” you say, “hold on, we are enter­ing a sweep­ing onramp and this is no Audi Quattro,” you lock the wheels and we are slid­ing sideways.

If only we could show this to owners of Opel Corsas oth­er­wise dis­in­ter­ested in auto­mo­tive trans­port. If only they could see the ebul­lient hollers pro­duced from unsta­ble hydro­car­bons in simple ways.

Viewed from the out­side, we could see sig­nif­i­cant flamery erupt from the exhaust pipe, melt­ing peb­bles down to glass. Rubber would peel off our tires for miles, but we are not on the out­side, we are riding in a truck with a neglected trip reg­is­ter and one has to con­sider the iner­tia of a high roofline.

It is about time to head for a port or a thor­ough­fare and it is also about time to con­sider the ethe­real qual­ity of auto­mo­tive deca­dence. If it has wheels, steer­ing and exhaust pipes and it can make you laugh, do you really need a Coun­tach Quat­trovalv­ole? It would cer­tainly come in handy.

But it is basi­cally unnecessary.

This was orig­i­nally writ­ten in Hun­gar­ian for the Summer 2007 issue of Total­car Expressz, a printed mag­a­zine about second-​hand cars.

∞ Published on Tuesday, July 8th, 2008

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