In a way, it’s almost surreal. The terrain is largely flat and the air thick with humidity that makes your shirt sodden. As you arc along the gentle curves, towering Southern pines flash by in your peripheral vision. It’s definitely American scenery, and yet, you don’t feel as if either you or the car you’re feathering along is out of place. It’s supple and muscular in the same moment. It’s meant for cruising fast. And it’s rare as all get-out. According to most informed estimates, about 488 examples of the Bitter SC coupe were built, including this 1985 variant, owned by a guy from its home market who’s bound and determined to keep the marque’s heritage alive in the United States, his adopted home.
The guy we’re talking about is Joachim Vinson, who we introduced you to in HS&EC #113. A doctoral-level physicist, and both the son and grandson of Opel mechanics in his native Germany, Joachim is on a one-man crusade to keep antique cars from Opel, and their derivatives, alive in the 21st century. He’s got a barn in Wake Forest, North Carolina, filled to the rafters with his parts cache, and several cars awaiting restoration. This, the Bitter SC, is one of them, and it may never get restored all the way because it’s a pretty reliable and entertaining driver.
“The Bitter company started out selling racing equipment and then became involved with Intermeccanica to build a car,” Joachim explained. “[Company founder Erich Bitter] wasn’t happy with the outcome, and then decided to build his own car, which was called the Bitter CD, based on the Opel Diplomat B. He built that car until Opel introduced the Senator, and then he built the SC on the Senator chassis. The CD stood for Coupe Diplomat, and the SC stood for Senator Coupe.”
Joachim has a lot of tribal Opel knowledge such as this. He’s also got six of the Opel-derived Bitter cars: numbers 008, 246, 319, 487; this car, number 508; and a Bitter SC convertible, number 563, of which only 21 were produced. Why the attraction to Bitters? “The thing that started us with the Bitter was that we wanted a nicer car than we had when we came to the U.S., when we were driving big American cars,” Joachim explains. “First, I wanted a BMW 6-series or a Porsche 928, which I really like, but I knew nothing about them. But my father had a new Opel Senator in 1982, and my wife and I had had an Opel Monza since 1981. I did my very first engine rebuild on my father’s Senator. So these were cars I really knew, even if they were wrapped in a different body.”
Anytime you’re discussing these cars, a little bit of history is in order. Erich Bitter was a former racer, tuner of cars and importer. The CD model was a hybrid that shoehorned an American V-8 into a Diplomat, in Iso Grifo or Facel Vega fashion. They were built in Bitter’s own factory outside Düsseldorf. Bitter starting working on its eventual replacement in 1977, the year before Opel launched the Senator. Bitter negotiated with Opel for the use of its new 3.0-liter straight-six, with cast-iron block and cylinder head, along with the three-speed General Motors Turbo Hydra-Matic 180 built for Opel in Strasbourg, France, which dated back to the Sixties. Mechanically, the Bitter SC is solidly Opel; it also made use of the Senator’s floorpan, firewall, cowling and other structural body parts.
The Bitter SC’s appearance is very Eighties, with its angular, formal-roof lines. It’s reminiscent of cars ranging from a Ferrari 400/412 to, if your tastes are oriented toward American looks, a fifth-generation Pontiac Le Mans coupe. Bitter did the initial drawings himself, then had his ideas smoothed by both Giovanni Michelotti and Opel’s design staff. Somebody, however, had to build the Bitter’s bodywork, and no German coachbuilding shop could take on the project. Bitter then formed Bitter Italia to build the bodies and interiors in Italy. The body fabrication was then subcontracted to OCRA of Turin, which, as it was learned later, stamped the body panels from cheap recycled steel. It wasn’t properly treated, and almost from the outset, the SC gained a reputation for being severely rust-prone, although steel and fabrication contracts were changed after the 79th car was built.
About 223 of the SC coupes made their way to the United States and Canada, with 144 remaining in Germany, 109 going to the rest of Europe and another 14 exported to the rest of the world, including the Middle East. Bitter wanted to ramp up production, and lacked the space to do so at his compound in Schwelm, so he contracted with Steyr-Daimler-Puch to build the SCs at its plant in Graz, Austria. According to the highly authoritative website www.bittercars.com, production there continued until late 1985, with pricing set at about $45,000 a pop, when financial difficulties brought the SC era to an end. Joachim’s car is his second Bitter. He found it in an online auction in 2000, offered by a dealership, Hawthorne Motor Company, in Richmond, Virginia. The seller was seeking about $10,000 for it.
“They could not get rid of the car,” Joachim remembered. “Nobody would bid on it. So I went up there with six-and-a-half thousand dollars in cashier’s checks, and told them, this is a one-time offer, take it or leave it. They took it. At the time, the car had 33,000 miles on it, and it had belonged to the owner of the dealership, which sold GM cars. I don’t remember which cars it sold, but I think it was Buicks. They told me the owner had gotten Alzheimer’s, so they sold the car.” In addition, he acquired a quantity of parts from the stock of Carter Pontiac Buick in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, near Vancouver.
Number 508 is a latter-day Bitter SC, which means it was treated to some engine upgrades. It’s still a naturally aspirated Opel straight-six, but the German tuner Mantzal came up with a stroker kit that boosted the engine’s displacement to 3.9 liters, good for an estimated 210 hp with standard Bosch L-Jetronic electronic fuel injection. As Joachim said, “It had been repainted, and that’s something that’s haunting me right now. They repainted everything but the hood, which was very strange, and I think that it was already beginning to rust when they painted it. Now, it’s really rusting below the rear window, and I’m going to have to address that soon. I’ll take the interior out, take all the rust off, weld in new metal and put it back together. But to do that, I’m going to have to take the rear window out, and these windows are held in with glue, so to get it out in one piece is going to be a nightmare.”
You’re not restoring a Mercedes-Benz or an MG when you take on a rotted SC. Despite his extensive parts stores, Joachim told us that replacement sheetmetal, either NOS or used, is virtually impossible to get. He’ll have to fabricate his own patch panels to correct the rust problem. To that end, he plans to take a specialty welding and sheetmetal-fabrication course at a California school. “I can bend small pieces with just one bend, but when you get into things like compound curvature, that’s very, very tricky. And I’m going to have to work on the metal strip underneath the rear window, which has several bends, and again, it’s going to be tricky.”
The car is much more solid in terms of its mechanicals and interior lavishness. We sampled the Bitter on a blast through the countryside around the Research Triangle and first realized how much we’d missed the syncopated beat of a straight-six. The power comes on gradually, or maybe it’s more accurate to say that it’s disciplined, rather than arriving all in a rush. Gear changing, with the selector in D, is like driving any other GM car, which is to say unobtrusively effortless. There’s probably not enough pure horsepower to rank the SC at the pinnacle of autobahn-ripping European GTs, but for anything less than that, the Opel six is fully adequate, its acceleration abetted by the 3.45:1 rear gears that were standard in U.S.-market SCs. The ride is appropriately supple until you start getting frisky; then you’ll learn to appreciate the assiduousness of the Bitter’s direction-changing capabilities. It’s fun, elegant and very pleasing to the eyes.
That doesn’t mean issues don’t crop up. “One of the things that happened was that it tried to burn down on me,” Joachim told us. “I do not understand what happened, but I have to take off the intake and exhaust manifolds and I haven’t had time to do it. What happened was, I started the car because my brother was over visiting, and he wanted to know if the 3.9 sounded the same as an Opel 3.0. So I started it up, let the car run for a minute, then turned it off and took the battery cable off. Then before I could close the hood, my brother said, ‘I see bubbles on the heater and blower housing. And now I can see holes. And now I can see flames.’ By that time, I was running for my fire extinguisher. I put it out, and to this day, I don’t have an idea what happened.”
Undaunted, Joachim took the Bitter to an independent BMW shop near Wake Forest (the Shade Tree Garage in Raleigh, well-known among local Bimmer drivers) that does some of his work. The technicians fitted new fuel injectors, new fuel lines, new belts and sundry repairs. Those included replacing the torsion springs that help raise the trunk lid; water dripping from the rear window area had corroded the OEM units to the point of uselessness. Also, as he said, “I got them to work on the power windows. They go up and down a lot faster now. The owner came from Germany and he’s factory-trained, not just on those cars but also on the Citroën SM, which is one of my favorite cars.”
What does the future hold for this appealing German-Austrian GT? Joachim’s parts stash includes a four-speed automatic from a later-model Opel Senator, and he might swap that in at some point. “It’s not really like a modern car from today,” he described. “It’s really more like a 6-series BMW from the Eighties. It was a daily driver from 2000 to 2006, but I still drive it, just not as much as I used to.”
1985 BITTER SC
Engine SOHC straight-six, cast-iron block and cylinder head Displacement 3,848 cc (235 cubic inches) Horsepower 210 (est.) @ 5,000 RPM Torque 236-lb.ft. @ 3,400 RPM Compression ratio 9.5:1 Induction Bosch L-Jetronic electronic fuel injection Gearbox General Motors three-speed Hydra-Matic with torque converter Performance 0 to 60 MPH 9.1 seconds* Standing 1/4-mile 16.9 seconds @ 82 MPH* Top speed 125 MPH* Overall length 190.1 inches Overall width 68 inches Overall height 55.7 inches Wheelbase 105.6 inches Curb weight 3,500 pounds *Source: Car and Driver, October 1981
