Marques and Models
The Alfasud – a technical tour de force that was scuppered by Russian steel.
Some cars gain a mythical status that far outweighs their technical prowess, others never receive the recognition they deserve. Then there are those like the Alfasud, which was rightly held in high regard at the time, but is now remembered as the car that sank Alfa Romeo. As Andrew Everett explains though, it could so easily have been a game-changer in a much more positive way.
It is very unlikely that we will ever again see an advance in car design quite like the 1971 Alfa Romeo Alfasud. Over-assisted and laden with things we don’t really need, the modern 12ft long hatchback may well be safer and faster, but it’s also 40% heavier and to generate similar lateral G force it needs tyres so wide that power steering is essential.
It’s also quite unlikely that a manufacturer will make a car again that will effectively sink its parent company the way the Sud did for Alfa Romeo. Before the Sud, Alfa were a proud Milanese company making high quality and expensive saloons, coupés and sports cars – think of a BMW but with even more heritage. However, in the late 1960s times were a- changing in the motor industry. As Jaguar knew in the 1960s and Rover were to discover in the 1990s, you were either a company making 50,000 cars a year and thus ripe for a takeover bid, or you were making half a million or more cars a year.
If like Alfa you were somewhere in the middle, you were not going to make it. Quite simply, the economies of scale were increasingly against you and your profits were being squeezed if you were selling your cars at an acceptable price. Those squeezed profits were then not enough to develop new models – the XJ6 for example was designed and built using a lot of BMC money that Jaguar didn’t have. To survive into the 1970s and beyond, Alfa needed a smaller and less expensive car to compete with the Fiat 128, in other words an agreeable and sophisticated Austin 1100/ Ford Escort sized car.
Various ideas were tried, including a small mini- Giulia with a two- cylinder twin cam, but that was never going to be a proper car. No, Alfa had to start from scratch, forget everything they’d done before and build an all-new front drive saloon with road manners and performance to compete with the 128, by far and away
the rival to equal or beat. To achieve this aim, new thinking was needed as well as a new factory. Alfa had been based in Milan, originally in Portello, but from 1963 in a new factory in Arese further to the northwest. The Arese factory was only big enough to build the existing rear drive cars, and so an allnew plant was required.
In an ideal world, Alfa would have expanded Arese or built a new factory in the Milan area, but the Italian government had other ideas. Alfa Romeo had been subject to varying degrees of government assistance since it first went broke in 1933 and was saved by Mussolini. By 1967, Alfa was pretty much state controlled (but not wholly owned) and most definitely a jewel in the crown. Whenever politics is involved with car manufacture, it can go horribly wrong – witness the Linwood Hillman Imp debacle where a car that was in reality no less reliable than the disastrous early Minis cost far too much to build in an effort to bring employment to a deprived region. That was a nightmare for Rootes – cars built far away from the central administration in Ryton, engines sent by rail, whole cars sent by return and thus a logistical disaster. Sadly it was one that Alfa Romeo were about to repeat.
With government pressure, Alfa Romeo were to find a ‘suitable’ site in Pomigliano D’Arco, a poor area northeast of Naples (Italy’s poorest city by far) and a few kilometres north of Mount Vesuvius. This hot climate of the South (‘Sud’) was rife with crime and poverty, but Alfa Romeo and the Italian government went ahead anyway. A new subcompany was started, I.N.C. A Alfa Sud (Industria Napoletana Costruzioni Autoveicoli or Neapolitan Car Manufacturing Alfa South), with Alfa holding 90% and the government the remaining 10% via Finmeccanica, a state owned industrial giant.
ENTER AN AUSTRIAN
For the entire Alfa Sud project – including the actual factory – Alfa Romeo hired the Austrian Rudolf Hruska, often called Rudolfo in press material. Hruska had worked for Porsche during World War II, developing both the Kubelwagen and the Tiger tank, and afterwards he set up a Porsche dealership in Merano, Northern Italy close to the Austrian border. His partner in the venture was none other than fellow Austrian Carlo Abarth, but Rudolf was soon back designing cars, assisting with projects such as the Alfa 1900 and the 1954 Giulietta. Later, the Simca 1000 and Fiat 128 were designed with a touch of his genius.
Hruska rejoined Alfa in 1967 and left in 1973, the year the Alfasud was launched in the UK. In 1974 he set up a design
consultancy in Arese, and from 1980 the Turin based I.D.E. A institute. Hruska passed away in 1995 with little recognition for his brilliant designs, of which the Alfasud was probably the crowning glory.
A NEW ALFA IS BORN
The Alfasud, more than any other car of the 1970s, showed up suspension systems such as Hydrolastic as the technical dead ends that they were. Instead, the Sud was suspended on four coils and it didn’t even have IRS. Yet the Sud’s technical specification shows how far ahead of the game it was, and many of the design features are still relevant today. Under the bonnet was an all-new flat four unit, chosen because it was wide and shallow, resulting in a low centre of gravity plus the low bonnet line so desirable on today’s cars for pedestrian impact protection. The Boxer unit shared nothing with the existing Alfa twin cam and was arguably not as exotic – the traditional twin cam unit was all alloy with a forged steel crank, studs and nuts for the connecting rod caps and fully vindicated the old saying that when you bought an Alfa, the mechanical parts were what you were really paying for and the bodywork was free.
The Alfasud unit was slightly more prosaic in its materials such as a cast iron block, but don’t let that fool you. Rather than use a split crankcase, Alfa used a one piece unit with a removable pressed steel sump to give access to the diagonally split connecting rods, and the main bearing caps that secured the stubby three bearing crank were bolted on both in the standard way and also with an extra two bolts per cap going in from the side, resulting in an incredibly stiff crankcase. The alloy heads had one camshaft each, turned by a pair of toothed rubber belts driven from the crank. Cars built until late 1974 had exposed belts, after which steel and plastic belt covers were fitted.
A single Solex carburettor sat in the centre of a wide inlet manifold that straddled the block and fitted into the head inlet ports.
An ingenious tappet adjustment system consisted of a hardened steel Allen screw in the centre of the tappet bucket. Two narrow camshaft lobes operated each tappet with a small hole drilled between them so that with the cam at the right angle, an Allen key could be inserted into the hole and engaged with the Allen screw to adjust the valve clearances. Those original Suds were packing just 1186cc with a large 80mm bore for big inlet and exhaust valves and a very short 59mm stroke. Power with that skinny single choke carburettor was 63bhp developed at 6000rpm, corresponding with around 95mph and thus ideal gearing for a car weighing 830kg. Rather than the usual transverse engine pioneered by Fiat and Autobianchi, Alfa Romeo went for the Audi style of transaxle gearbox with the engine’s flywheel about in line with the front wheels and the engine mounted forwards – the very short engine length meant it had nothing like the front engine overhang of the contemporary Renaults or Audi 90 and 100, however. Four gear ratios were provided with built in space for a fifth gear, but unlike other Alfas, fifth was to be an overdrive and not a direct drive (1:1) top gear.
Suspension appeared on paper not to be that exotic, with a dead beam rear axle and McPherson front struts, but again Hruska’s team made it special. The front struts for example are not the usual Ford type affairs where the whole strut turns – Alfa redesigned them so that the upper part of the strut with the spring and its carrier plates remained stationary (almost), and the lower part of the strut turned inside it on fine needle roller bearings. Alfa did this so that as the steering was turned, the
strut camber angle could vary without using anything as crude as an offset top strut mounting.
At the back, the dead axle beam was located by five links – four longitudinal links (two facing forwards and two facing backwards), plus a transverse Panhard rod to eliminate sideways axle movement. Not just that, but the links were designed and angled in such a way as to promote a modicum of rear wheel steering. Generous spring travel was a given, along with soft yet carefully calculated damping so that the Sud had a relatively firm yet compliant ride that would work with the tyres – 145SR 13s on early home market cars and 165/ 70s on everything else, including the earliest UK bound examples. The steering was by rack and pinion, and the rack was mounted as high up on the bulkhead as possible so that the track rods operated on steering arms that were right underneath the front spring cups, eliminating bump and torque steer.
Brakes were another unusual step forward, being huge 258mm discs on the front and 233mm discs on the back. The fronts would never fit inside a 13in wheel so to aid the fitment of bigger brakes and also to reduce unsprung weight, they were inboard with calipers bolted to the transaxle, the handbrake operating via a cable onto lever mechanisms on the calipers. Dual circuit hydraulics were a given, and all UK cars had a servo to give a truly exceptional set of brakes.
The result of all this detail work was a car that not only made the existing Alfa model range look decidedly old fashioned (the equally good Alfetta was launched a year later), but joined the Citroën GS in a two car assault on small to medium car design in an attempt to really raise the bar.
ONWARDS BUT NOT UPWARDS
From the word go, the Alfa Sud factory was nothing but trouble for Alfa. Absenteeism ran at up to a staggering 20% and while the Alfa engine plant supplied a ready stream of boxer engines and gearboxes, cars in which to use them came off the line at a pitiful rate. It’s doubtful that Pomigliano ever ran at more than a high of 60% capacity. Upon launch in Italy the Alfasud was a bit of a flop; it sold only slowly in the prosperous Alfa-buying north that treats anything made in the south with disdain – the British North-South divide is nothing compared to Italy.
However, on launch in European markets, and especially Britain, the Alfasud was very well received. It was launched here on 1st August 1973 as a 1200 four door with vinyl trim, servo brakes, fourspeed box and no rev counter. Priced at £1417, it compared well with cars such as the Escort 1300XL (£1431) and the Allegro 1300 Deluxe at £1310. The Alfasud/Allegro comparison is an interesting one because whilst the Austin wasn’t as bad as many make out, it was still nowhere near as good as the Alfa. Hold it at the steady 90mph at which the Alfa would buzz away all day and the 1275 A-Series would explode before long. And its ride and handling were not even in the same county, never mind ballpark.
Giugiaro’s pert styling also gave the Alfasud huge sales appeal – compare it with an HC Viva for example to see how modern it looked. Big sills gave the shell excellent rigidity, and both careful rubber mountings for the engine and gearbox as well as twin front bulkheads gave the Sud astonishing refinement. A Marina was like a bullock dray by comparison with the sophisticated and more reliable Alfa, whose mechanical warranty claims were extremely low.
Demand for the Sud soon outstripped supply and whilst the 1974 VW Golf did benefit from a hatchback, the Sud could have sold very strongly as it was if only the factory built could have enough, and built them properly.
DID SOMEONE SAY RUST?
This brings us to the main problem with the
Sud – absolutely rampant, unstoppable body rot. Early cars were so bad that most 1973 examples were scrap by 1978/ 79. They rusted everywhere. They’d rot around the bonded in screens until those were abandoned in favour of rubber mounted glass in 1978, the front wings would quite literally rust off along the tops followed by rear arches, valances, sills and jacking points. This was due to the awful recycled steel Finmeccanica were getting from Russia. So bad was this steel that there was rust already in it when the panels were stamped out, resulting in rust scabs appearing in the middle of an undamaged panel.
Alfa Nord cars were almost as bad (Alfetta Coupés were shocking) and whilst Alfa made gradual improvements, they were still poor until the very end in 1983. But still demand was there because nothing really compared with it, not an Escort Sport, not a Chevette and certainly nothing BL made. The Sud was sophisticated far beyond its derisory price tag and if you wanted the finest small/medium car, you had to put up with the rust and fix it as you went along.
Derivatives arrived in time – the faster Ti in 1974, a 1300 in 1977, the punchy 1500 cars in 1978 and the punchier twin carburettor 1500 Veloces in 1979. The pretty Sprint arrived here in 1977, and plastic bumpers only slightly defiled the
Sud in early 1980, with the saloon gaining a hatchback for 1981.
THE END
By 1983, the Sud was on the chopping block, its replacement Alfa 33 on the starting grid and a cheap and cheerful Nissanbased Sud replacement ready for 1984. The Sprint continued until 1989, though. However, the 33 never grabbed the imagination like its predecessor, and the much maligned 1984 Arna was a disaster despite a combination of virtues – Alfa handling, ride and performance all wiped out by boxy Nissan Cherry styling. Reeling from an underperforming 33 and a sales disaster Arna as well as a collapsing UK market, the Italian government called time and sold Alfa Romeo to Fiat in 1986. There had been bad blood between Fiat and Alfa since the Sud project had been announced, and the company was now destined to endure years of wilful neglect until the late Sergio Marchionne arrived as CEO of Fiat.
Today, the Alfasud is a treasure that exists only in tiny numbers, rarely seen on the road. Mechanically it is both complex for its time yet robust and a delight to work on, a fine example of no- compromise automotive engineering. Before you even consider paying ten grand for a Ford Escort, you’d be well advised to consider the alternatives, and if you can find one, an Alfasud should be at the very top of that list.