The last-chance saloon of Germany's forgotten tin-top champions

When the DTM resumed amid much fanfare in 2000, it wasn't Audi that took the fight to that year's dominant manufacturer, Mercedes. And it certainly wasn't BMW - the only marque left in the DTM as it stands next year following Audi's decision to withdraw - as it wasn't until 2012 that it made its long-awaited return.

Rather, it was Opel, which had won the last edition of the DTM under class one rules in 1996 with Manuel Reuter, that posed the biggest threat to Mercedes dominance. Reuter won four times in 2000 - only two less than runaway champion Bernd Schneider - to finish the season as runner-up, while fellow Astra Coupe drivers Joachim Winkelhock and Uwe Alzen added a further four between them, amounting to exactly a 50/50 split with Mercedes over the 16 races.

Opel drivers had won five of the last six races in all, but hopes that it would be a sign of things to come in 2001 were quickly dashed as a Laurent Aiello-led Audi instead rose to the fore as Mercedes' principal challenger. Opel didn't even score a podium as lead driver Reuter slumped to tenth in the points, and it didn't get much better in 2002, as Aiello and Audi toppled Schneider for the title. Reuter's pole at Donington and Alain Menu's second at the Sachsenring were the main highlights.

For the Astra's final year in 2003, Peter Dumbreck joined from Mercedes and eclipsed the points tally of all the other Opel drivers put together, scoring the marque's only podium with second at the Lausitzring. In short, Opel needed a big 2004 to reset the balance, and much expectation was placed on the new Vectra GTS.

But expectation was no match for reality, and when Opel withdrew from the DTM at the end of 2005, the highly-anticipated new car had managed just three podiums, no wins and is mostly remembered for Dumbreck's monster shunt at Zandvoort.

Designed by Jean-Claude Martens under technical director and current Haas Formula 1 boss Gunther Steiner (pictured below with Reuter) and Opel motorsport manager Volker Strycek - the inaugural DTM champion in 1984 - at the Opel Performance in Russelheim, the Vectra GTS was powered by a 476 bhp V8 tuned by Spiess.

British engineer James Goodfield was brought into the fold for '04 at Steiner's invitation to run Timo Scheider at Team Holzer, having previously worked with Steiner at M-Sport and the Jaguar Formula 1 team.

Goodfield recalls the Vectra being an "amazing piece of kit" that was "incredibly tuneable; it had so many mechanical and aero options and much more advanced from an engineering perspective" than the Astra, but recalls it was hampered by problems getting the Dunlop tyres up to temperature in qualifying.

"If we could get the tyres switched on, the car worked pretty well but we did struggle with getting the tyres to work, particularly on the front axle," says Goodfield, who later went on to engineer Team GB's A1GP effort and was the chief engineer responsible for the centrally-run FIA Formula 2 Championship run between 2009 and 2012.

"You would hit the brakes and the aero over the front of the car would make it porpoise, so it would vibrate under braking" Peter Dumbreck

"I suspect if we'd had a bit more front downforce, we'd have had a better chance at getting the front tyre a bit hotter for qualifying. I'm not sure whether it would have transformed things, but it certainly would have been interesting to know."

The Vectra's struggles with a lack of front-end grip had also dogged the latest iteration of its predecessor. Dumbreck had used a 2002-spec Astra to good effect for the majority of 2003, and felt the same lack of feel from the Vectra as his team-mates had been reporting the previous year.

"Obviously everything moves forward each year but sometimes you get in the car and think 'I wish I was in last year's car, it was better than this,'" he says. "But actually when you compare it on a laptime, you realise that you are quicker, but it just doesn't feel as good.

"The sweet spot [on the Vectra] seemed a lot smaller. If you had the car running in its sweet spot then it felt good and you were up there, but you just never were quite on the pace of the front-running Mercedes and Audi. You needed a perfect car to be up there at all and when it wasn't perfect, it was just such a fight just for a top-10 finish."

The search for more front-end grip had other confidence-damaging side effects too.

"Once you start hunting for downforce you start trying to run the front very low and then it becomes quite pitch-sensitive," says Goodfield.

"So you end up with the front so low that a little bit of pitch in the car under braking and [the aero] stalls."

Dumbreck recalls this trait all too well.

"You would hit the brakes and the aero over the front of the car would make it porpoise, so it would vibrate under braking," he says. "The car went bang, bang, bang on the brakes into the tight corners - we had to raise the ride height so it wasn't hitting the ground, but the higher you go with the car, the worse it was. Whatever we tried, the 2004 car didn't work."

Although he had extensive motorsport experience in rallying, 2004 was Goodfield's first season as a race engineer so "tended to keep things simple with Timo, we didn't turn the car upside-down each weekend". It paid dividends as Scheider beat his better-established team-mates - which by now also included Aiello - to rank as the top Opel driver. Reuter scored the Vectra's only podium of 2004 at Oschersleben, while Marcel Fassler, another big-name signing from Mercedes, took a pair of fourths.

For Dumbreck, the year didn't get any better than a sixth in the opening round at Hockenheim, and his 120mph crash at Zandvoort's flat out final corner was one of few times that the Valvoline-backed car commanded the attention of the TV cameras. Fortunately, the Scot emerged from the wreck unscathed, but the cause remains a mystery to this day.

"Aiello had two rear hub failures during the weekend that put him off halfway round the track and into the gravel," he says.

"All I know is that I turned in on new tyres, the first lap on new tyres and they were hot, ready to go, and an easy flat corner that had been flat every other lap suddenly wasn't flat anymore, and I understeered right off. As soon as I realised, 'the front's not going in', it was too late because as soon as you get off the race line, you're on that sand and grit and bang, you're in the wall.

"Whether it was a hub failure or a different bit on the car I don't know, the car was absolutely written off so I don't know what happened with the car, but it just was very strange."

"Had the programme continued for a couple more years, the Opel team - not just the car, would have been competitive with the other manufacturers, I'm sure of that" James Goodfield

Scheider's performances counted for little though, as General Motors announced that the DTM programme would be a casualty of wider cuts to the business, and it would scale back its entry from six cars to four for its final season in 2005. The out-of-contract Scheider was let go, along with Dumbreck, while Reuter and Aiello were given one-year extensions to continue alongside new signings for 2004 Fassler and Formula 1 refugee Heinz-Harald Frentzen.

"Aiello was approaching his retirement, he was a mega driver but he just wasn't interested anymore," says Dumbreck. "He was like, 'I've done it all and now I'm having to drive this shitbox car', but Opel offered him a contract for 2005 when I still really wanted to be there and had something to prove.

"In the end, it came down to me or Reuter for the last seat and I stuck my foot in it by saying I'd probably got an option to go to Japan."

Goodfield (pictured below, right) was switched to running Frentzen in 2005 and again finished as the best of the Vectra runners, racking up two podiums at Brno and Zandvoort. But he regrets that the programme wasn't allowed to continue for longer to make full use of the talents at its disposal and prove that the car was better than its record shows.

"We had a few really experienced guys, but we also had quite a handful of people like myself who were pretty inexperienced and I think had it continued longer-term, we'd have been in a really strong position," he says.

"Considering the fact we were running four cars compared to the other teams running six to eight, the car was much more competitive that year and had the programme continued for a couple more years, the Opel team - not just the car, would have been competitive with the other manufacturers, I'm sure of that.

"In terms of its mechanical adjustability and its ability to move its weight distribution, everything about the car was pretty good, there wasn't particularly any areas other than perhaps aerodynamics that it was really lacking in."

Goodfield got the chance to directly compare the Vectra against a similar vintage Mercedes when he landed at Mucke Motorsport for 2006 to run a 2004-spec C-Class for series rookie Susie Stoddart (now Wolff). It wasn't long before he reached the conclusion that Opel had been closer to the pace than it realised.

"We probably thought we'd got something wrong with the set-up equipment, because the in first few events that thing had so much understeer," he says. "Mercedes were adamant that it didn't, but when Susie talked to drivers who'd driven it two years earlier, they said 'oh that car, good luck with that'.

"So perhaps with the Opel we weren't as far away at the time as we thought we were and some slightly different warmup procedures [would have made a difference], but I think the car itself definitely wasn't as bad as the results indicated, it deserved to be more successful than it was.

"We were running third in the second round at Estoril before Timo sampled the gravel trap for some reason. It wasn't that the car couldn't do it, it wasn't that the team couldn't do it."

Compared to the hierarchical structure at Mercedes, where there could be no doubt that the HWA team had the best personnel and drivers, Opel had more of a flat structure between the Holzer and Phoenix teams, with the top engineering talent distributed around between them. Dumbreck reckons this contributed to Opel's struggles.

"Opel were more spread and maybe they should have favoured an ultimate team and one or two drivers like Mercedes did," he says. "I felt a lot more at home in Opel, it was a much friendlier atmosphere and less politics but I think with less politics you didn't get the results and that's essentially it."

But speaking to Autosport in 2017, long-time Opel driver Reuter - who had won the ITR in 1996 with a structure led by Wolfgang Peter Flohr and technical director Wolfgang Hatz - offered his view that the issues ran deeper.

"Laurent said, 'Manuel we have to do something, when we homologate this package, we will be fucked before the first race'. He was completely frustrated" Manuel Reuter

"You need a person like Flohr or Hatz, key players to set up a team in all the important areas that you are able to fight and Volker I think was not capable of forming the right team," he said. "So often, the right people in the right position is the key message, the key areas so you can form and also bring new people on board.

"In the end you have to say Opel was at this time not able to deliver a winning package which you were able to run consistently on the top five or top three. From 2002 onwards we were not on the performance level like the other manufacturers.

"Then they said 'we have a problem of the drivers, we have to bring in Aiello and Menu and Fassler', they were winning championships and winning races with other manufacturers, but they were not able to run once on the top three.

"On the other side it was quite nice, we had good names who were winning races [with other manufacturers], but they were not quicker. So I said 'you see, it's always what I said, we have at the moment the wrong package'."

Despite his long-standing status within Opel, Reuter added that his concerns weren't listened to.

"I remember the test in Barcelona in 2004 with Laurent, where we tried to finalise the latest aero, but we were going completely in the wrong direction from the driver's side," he said.

"Laurent said, 'Manuel we have to do something, when we homologate this package, we will be fucked before the first race'. He was completely frustrated. I said 'Laurent, we can only give our feedback, we can push for it, but... It was a hard time, a frustrating time."

It was hardly befitting of Reuter and Aiello's ultra-successful careers that both should end their driving days at the end of 2005 in the Vectra, a car that was more damp squib than a last hurrah for Opel in the DTM. The marque that had traditionally been the choice for blue-collar workers would be leaving the series red-faced.