This was my first car, a Ford Escort 1600 Sport, which my dad bought me in 1989, a few months before I finished my national service.

This was my second car and first Opel, an Opel Kadett 1.6 GL, which I bought in December 1991. This was where my love for Opel began as this was a nice car. It was very light on fuel, ran well and never gave me problems in the 2 years and 4 months I had it.

Here are my current two cars. An Opel Monza 2.0 GLi and an Opel Corsa 160 GSi. I bought the Monza in March 1994 and the Corsa (my first NEW car) in February 2000. The Monza, as you'll see further down the page used to be white. I sprayed the carAcid Green in February 2001. Acid Green is actually a BMW colour. The Corsa is still stock standard. I don't really know if I'll modify it in any way, as the Monza is really my 'race' car.

The Monza came standard with a 2 litre 8 valve engine, leather seats, air-con and digital instruments. The engine was modified as follows: Pipercross air-filter, gas-flowed throttle-body and cylinder head, 296 cam, 2.1 bottom end, branch and free-flow pipe and a chip with 7500rpm limiter. I could easily run up to 7000 in fourth gear and my best quarter mile time at Tarlton was 16.1 seconds with 174km/h over 800m. In 1997 I fitted a 16V motor. The only modification I made to it was to gas-flow the head when I installed the motor. The best I could get over 800m with this motor was 172km/h.

When I sprayed the car earlier this year I decided to do some colour coding. You can see the result here. All the stickers you see here I made myself. I cut it by hand from sticker vinyl which I got from Plastic World in Johannesburg. As you can see, the second engine photo shows sidedraught carbs instead of the fuel injection. I swapped to the carbs April 2001. At the bottom of the page is a link to a page showing photos of the carb conversion and some info on other mods.

"What happened here?" I hear you ask. Well, on 27 April 2001, I was driving on Ontdekkers Rd towards Johannesburg. As I crossed Christiaan de Wet, a guy with a silver BMW, came onto Ondekkers Rd from the left. He took the slipway too fast and lost control of the car. He first went over the left curb into the service road where he hit another BMW. He then came back onto Ontdekkers and hit me on the left rear wheel. The impact forced me into the centre island's curb which bent the whole rear axle.

Modifications