Alfa Romeo Diva: The Prototype Alfa Wouldn’t Sign In 2006, while Alfa Romeo was preparing to return to the American market with a quarter-million-dollar grand tourer, it took a 1,100 kg mid-engined two-seater to the Geneva Motor Show and parked it in a Swiss design school’s booth. Among student projects. With the doors shut for … Read more
Alfa Romeo 33/2 Coupé Speciale: The Ferrari Show Car That Became an Alfa The man who designed the Ferrari F40 also designed a bright yellow Alfa Romeo. Almost nobody knows that. What even fewer people know is that the Alfa was not really designed as an Alfa at all. It was a Ferrari show car … Read more
Alfa Romeo 8C Competizione: The Alfa That Alfa Romeo Didn’t Build America got 84 of them. Maybe 90. Nobody has nailed that number down either, and that turns out to be the whole story of this car. The Alfa Romeo 8C Competizione was the car that brought Alfa Romeo back to the United States after … Read more
Tazio Nuvolari: The Italian Who Humiliated the Silver Arrows On Their Own Soil On 28 July 1935, in the rain-soaked German hell that was the Nürburgring of the Eifel mountains, a 42-year-old Italian called Tazio Nuvolari climbed into a Grand Prix car carrying 110 horsepower less than the competition and proceeded to win a race … Read more
Achille Varzi: The Anti-Nuvolari, the Morphine, and the Helmet He Wasn’t Wearing Drop Tazio Nuvolari and Achille Varzi into the same room and the only thing they share is the language they speak. Everything else divides them. Nuvolari came from a Lombard farm, the son of a cyclist. Varzi came from a Piedmontese textile factory, … Read more
Alfa Romeo 8C 2300: The Car That Buried Bentley at Le Mans Four Years Running Between 1923 and 1930, Le Mans belonged to Bentley. The British marque won five of the first eight editions of the 24 Hours (1924, 1927, 1928, 1929, 1930), with those enormous British Racing Green machines, 4.5- and 6.5-litre engines the … Read more
Antonio Ascari: The European Champion the Sport Killed Before He Could Lift the Crown Let me start with the coincidence, because there isn’t another way to start. Two men dead at age 36. Both on the 26th day of the month. Both four days after surviving a serious accident. Both at the exit of a … Read more
Ugo Sivocci: The Missing Corner of the Quadrifoglio Next time you see an Alfa Romeo Quadrifoglio, lean in and look at the badge on the front wing. Forget for a second that the four-leaf clover is one of the most recognisable performance markers in motoring, alongside the M of BMW M Sport, the AMG of … Read more
Alfa Romeo Giulia GTA: The Most Successful European Touring Car in History Nobody Quite Names Correctly Two hundred and five kilograms. That’s the weight difference between a 1965 Alfa Romeo Giulia Sprint GT — the kind you might have seen parked outside a Bologna café — and an Alfa Romeo Giulia GTA, the car this … Read more
Alfa Romeo GTV 916: How to Build a Special Car with Parts That Weren’t Some cars feel special because everything underneath them was engineered exclusively for the job. And then there is the Alfa Romeo GTV Type 916. The Italian coupé of the 1990s did not sit on a from-scratch dedicated sports platform. Chunks of … Read more
Fiat: 126 years to build an empire, five to dismantle it Every so often Top Gear used to do those hagiographies about brands that “shaped motoring”. They did Ferrari. They did Aston. They did Porsche. They never quite did Fiat properly, and if you think about it for more than thirty seconds, that omission is … Read more
Alfa Romeo 75: The Last Real Alfa Romeo, the Car That Closed a Century of Independent Marque There are three things any serious Alfisti will tell you about the Alfa Romeo 75 before you’ve finished saying hello: One: the 75 is the last Alfa Romeo with transaxle architecture in the marque’s history. After the 75, in 1992, no … Read more
