Ralf Antweiler's hands smelled like gearbox oil for weeks when he was eight years old. He'd been allowed to use a 13mm wrench on something. That was enough. "It was my destiny to end up in rally sport," he says. "With everything that comes with it."
Everything that comes with it, in Ralf's case, included a bar at the Panari Hotel in Nairobi. It was 2005. He and his girlfriend Tanja were part of a McKlein press crew covering a 10,000-kilometer rally through Kenya. Tanja was the photographer. Ralf was, by his own admission, useless dead weight. The cars were checking in through the courtyard, time control stamps getting renewed, and Ralf went to the bar. He started talking to an Indian guy. International crowd, the usual question. Where are you from. Germany. And when Germany came up, the man mentioned that a friend of his had a car from Germany. Ralf asked what it was. An Opel Ascona 400. At four in the morning, the man pressed an address into his hand.
Two years sat on that address. In 2007, Ralf was back in Kenya for the same rally. After it ended in Mombasa, he turned to Reinhard Klein and asked what they were going to do about it. Klein said let's fly there. In Kenya, you can buy plane tickets at the supermarket. So that's what they did. A day later they were in a taxi tearing through a side district of Nairobi, knocking on the door of an Indian family's home.
Tea first. An hour of it. Then Ralf asked if they could see the cars. There were two. One was a running works Ascona 400. The other was the diamond.
The papers were there. The type plate was there. The RA numbers were there. RA40. Rohkarosse Ascona No. 40. The chassis built specifically for Africa. What wasn't there was any sense of order. The Chagger property was two, maybe three thousand square meters, and over the years the car's parts had migrated across every corner of it. Ralf asked Baldev where the cockpit was. Baldev clapped his hands twice. Staff scattered in every direction. Piece by piece, they tracked it all down. It was complete.
What they had was the car that won Walter Röhrl the 1982 World Rally Championship. The last rear-wheel drive car to ever win it.
The 1982 season was a duel. Röhrl in the Ascona 400 against Michèle Mouton in the Audi Quattro. Old technique against new. Naturally aspirated, rear-wheel drive, around 240 horsepower through 48mm Weber carburetors against turbocharged all-wheel drive. Röhrl won Monte Carlo to open the season. Mouton took Portugal, Greece, and Brazil. The Ascona's body was built by Matter in Switzerland, the 16-valve twin-cam head by Cosworth, the exterior by Irmscher. It was reliable. Steady. Not the fastest thing on the grid, but always there at the end. Four hundred road cars were built in Antwerp to meet Group 4 homologation. The "400" was the number, not a displacement figure.
The penultimate round was the Rallye Côte d'Ivoire. Five thousand kilometers of African jungle roads. Röhrl didn't even want to go. Mouton built an hour lead over the first two days. Then the Quattro started breaking. Technical failures on the third stage ate into her advantage. On the final leg, the car wouldn't start. She pushed to recover time, crashed, and was out. Out of the rally. Out of the championship. Röhrl and co-driver Christian Geistdörfer won the event and the title. November 1st, 1982. The two of them standing on top of the car with glasses of champagne.
After that, RA40 went back to Germany, served as a scout car for the Rothmans Opel Rally Team on the 1983 Safari Rally, then was sold to a German privateer in Kenya. It raced in the Kenyan national championship through about 1990. Then it disappeared. Ended up in Uganda. Daljit Chager brought it back to Kenya, parked it on his property, and there it sat. Opel believed the car was gone forever.
The restoration took six years. Ralf's approach was simple. If it survived, it stayed. The steering wheel was taken apart, cleaned with nothing but shoe polish, and put back together with every mark intact. The door side panels still carry the red earth of Kenya. They will never be cleaned. If a panel was screwed to the door with a self-tapping screw, that's how it went back. The car is a Matter-bodied prototype. On the outside it looks like an Ascona. It has nothing to do with a regular Ascona anymore. Where the sheet metal was destroyed, Ralf cut the original Matter reinforcements free. Days of work per panel. He built new outer skins and welded the original reinforcements back in, measuring every seam to match the factory position. Nobody will ever check. But that was the standard.
"When you have a car in such terrible condition," Ralf says, "you should have the heart to save as much as there is to save."
During the restoration, a period photograph revealed the car's factory nickname. A small plastic label, the kind the Opel works team stuck to all their cars. This one read Django.
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