The glamour of Alfa Romeo
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Under its previous administration, the presenters of the BBC’s Top Gear programme frequently insisted that you can’t be a true petrolhead if you have never owned an Alfa Romeo.
Since I’ve never owned one myself, I question this statement robustly, but I do take the point. Despite decades of stories about unreliable Alfas, there is something special about them.
In particular, many (though definitely not all) Alfas have had a certain glamour. Even the name has a certain ring to it, though it’s actually quite prosaic – Alfa comes from the initials of Anonima Lombarda Fabbrica Automobili (Lombardy Car Factory Ltd) while Romeo was the surname of an early investor.
Here are some of the most glamorous cars Alfa Romeo has ever produced, along with one exception included to show that silver linings often have clouds.
6C
Alfa Romeo used the 6C name (derived from the fact that the engines had six cylinders) for road and competition cars built between 1927 and 1954.
Coachbuilders came up with a great many body styles, but for me the earlier cars, with their open bodies, upright radiators and separate headlights, are the most glamorous.
8C
The 8C was similar in concept to the 6C but was designed a few years later and had V8 engines of varying capacity.
8Cs were enormously successful in motorsport, winning the Le Mans 24 Hour race four times on the trot from 1931 to 1934. The car pictured above has the streamlined body used at Le Mans.
On the Mille Miglia open-road course, 8Cs were victorious six times between 1932 and 1938, and won again in 1947.
158/159 Alfetta
Unlike the cars mentioned so far, the 158 Alfetta and its successor, the 159, were never intended for road use. The 158 was designed as a Grand Prix racer in the late 1930s and dusted down for re-use after the Second World War.
It was staggeringly successful. A 158 driven by Giuseppe Farina won the first ever World Championship F1 race at Silverstone in 1950, and it wasn’t until the next British Grand Prix a year later that Alfa Romeo lost a race of this type that it had entered. (The Indianapolis 500 was a counter in those days, but European teams didn’t pay much attention to it.)
The winning streak came to an end because the Alfas, though enormously powerful, got through fuel at a fantastic rate. They had to stop twice for refills at Silverstone, while a slower but more economical Ferrari didn’t have to stop at all.
Disco Volante
Just five experimental Disco Volante sports racing cars were built in 1952 and 1953. Originally they were all extremely aerodynamic, though one was later given a more conventional body.
The futuristic shape inspired their name, which is the Italian for ‘flying saucer’.
A much later Disco Volante based on the 8C Competizione was unveiled at the 2012 Geneva Motor Show.
Dauphine
Alfa Romeo has produced many small cars over the years, but arguably the prettiest of them all was the Dauphine of the late 1950s.
To be honest, it wasn’t actually an Alfa Romeo at all but a very slightly modified Renault built under licence in Milan.
There was a historical precedent for this. The company which became Alfa Romeo was established in 1906 to build cars designed by another French manufacturer, Darracq.
GTA
In 1962, Alfa Romeo launched a boxy saloon car called the Giulia. It was quickly followed by a much more attractive coupe version which was given various names including GTA.
A racing derivative called the GTAm and driven by Toine Hezemans won the 1970 European Touring Car Championship. Forty years later, the GTAm narrowly beat the 8C Competizione in a poll to determine which model Alfa fans liked best.
Spider
The Spider was given a big publicity boost within a year of its introduction when it appeared in the 1967 film The Graduate in the hands of Dustin Hoffman.
In the end, though, the two-seat convertible’s long-term success may have been due more to its looks than to its short time in the spotlight. Alfa Romeo was able to continue building and selling it until as late as 1993, making detail changes but never straying far from the original design.
Tipo 33
The Tipo 33 sports car had a very long run, continuing to win races more than a decade after it was conceived.
Perhaps the most dramatic-looking version was the 33TT12 shown above, which won seven of the nine rounds in the 1975 World Sportscar Championship, scoring 140 points to second-placed Porsche’s 98.
Two years later, the same Championship had eight rounds. The 33TT12’s successor, the 33SC12, won all of them.
33
Completely unrelated to the Tipo 33 mentioned earlier, this model was one of several which showed that Alfa Romeo sometimes doesn’t even attempt to be glamorous.
Designed in the early 1980s, the 33 was simply a small family car with no sporting aspirations or sex appeal whatever.
No doubt it has its enthusiasts, but there is unlikely to be any point in human history when the majority view is that the 33 exudes more glamour than, say, the Spider.
Brera
Alfa Romeo produced some interesting coupes and convertibles in the 1990s, but none of them caught the eye to quite the same extent as the slightly later Brera.
The key to the Brera’s design was its triple-headlight design, first seen on a Giugiaro concept car in 2002. It was very dramatic and very effective.
The Brera’s shape also gave a sense of forward motion even when the car was sitting still. Breras could be driven in reverse, but they didn’t look as if they wanted to be.
159
The 159 was a successor to the 156 and the earlier 155, and looked far better than either of them. This was largely because it shared the triple headlights also seen on the Brera.
Both cars were built on the same platform, which was developed jointly by General Motors and the Fiat Group. As things turned out, only Alfa Romeo used it for production cars. GM models based on it, including a Saab and a Buick, never made it to the showrooms.
8C Competizione
The Competizione and its convertible equivalent, the Spider, were two of the most dramatic Alfa Romeos of recent years.
Sharing their name with the 8C of the 1930s, they both had carbonfibre bodies and used a lot of technology developed by Maserati, including a 4.7-litre V8 engine.
They were also rear-wheel drive, a feature which used to be common on Alfas but had not been used for several years before the Competizione was launched in 2007.
4C
The 4C is a lightweight two-seat sports car launched in 2013 and available in both coupe and Spider convertible forms.
Very unusually for an Alfa Romeo, it’s mid-engined and is based on a carbonfibre bodyshell. Regardless of body shape, it has a kerb weight of under 1000kg, which makes it lighter than a Mazda MX-5.
Stelvio
Like almost every other manufacturer, Alfa Romeo was eventually obliged to add an SUV to its range.
This didn’t mean it had to abandon the idea of glamour. The Stelvio is quite sporty, and perhaps more importantly it also looks it.
Even its name is resonant. It refers to the Stelvio Pass in northern Italy, widely regarded as one of Europe’s finest driving roads.