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
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
Ferrari 125 S, A Promising Failure: How Ferrari Began with Three Broken Words May 11, 1947. Piacenza circuit, northern Italy. The first car ever to wear the Ferrari name is leading its debut race. Then a fuel pump dies. The driver pulls in. The car stops. There are two normal reactions to this scenario. One: … Read more
Alfa Romeo 147 GTA: Busso’s Final Symphony Crammed Into a Hot Hatch Some cars exist because a spreadsheet said they should. Others exist because someone in an engineering meeting lost their mind for just long enough that nobody could stop them. The Alfa Romeo 147 GTA belongs firmly in the second category. A 3.2-liter naturally … Read more
The Alfa Romeo Busso V6: The Engine That Sounds Like God Gargling 27 Years of Mechanical Poetry Between 1979 and 2005, Alfa Romeo produced an engine so sonically transcendent that automotive journalists have exhausted their thesauruses trying to describe it. The Busso V6—named after its creator Giuseppe Busso—wasn’t the most powerful engine of its era. … Read more
The Alfa Romeo GTV6: The Last True Alfa Before the Dark Ages When Italy Still Built Driver’s Cars In 1980, Alfa Romeo did something that seems impossibly romantic in hindsight: they took a perfectly good sports coupé and installed one of the greatest engines ever built. The engine was Giuseppe Busso‘s 2.5-liter V6. The car … Read more
