Norfolk – twinned with Tuscany? ACA conjours up an unrelated Italian quintet
A single sale at Anglia Car Auctions has produced not one but five classic Alfa Romeo and Maserati barn finds: a 1959 Giulietta Sprint, a 1976 GT Junior, a 1975 Montreal, 1968 Maserati Quattroporte and a 1990 Biturbo Spyder. What’s equally remarkable is that this does not represent one vendor’s collection; instead every car is from a separate source. Is East Anglia as rich in ageing Italian exotica as the barns and outbuildings of Tuscany?
‘Not quite,’ says Guy Snelling of ACA. ‘While the GT Junior and the Giulietta are local cars, we have vendors coming to us from all over the country, and the two Maseratis are actually from the south coast and the London area, though it’s still very unusual to find five such cars in one sale.’
The Biturbo Spyder is a strange case, having been first registered in June 1990 and yet kept off the road in storage since 1993, when it was already showing 48,000 miles – it’s a one-owner car. It sold for £6048 on a £7000-£9000 estimate. The Quattroporte, looking very butch on Seventies slot-mag wheels, has suffered a more conventional lay-up – engine trouble in 1990 took it off the road and the engine and gearbox remained dismantled, and went with the car on a pallet. It made £11,124 with no reserve.
The Alfa Romeo Montreal suffered a similar fate – off the road since 1984, a colour-change began but wasn’t finished and that intimidating quad-cam V8 is now seized. A top bid of £17,280 bought it. The GT Junior looked a simpler prospect, fresh from 30 years of storage with no stated major faults but in Guy’s view, ‘needing a fair bit’. It made £14,580 on no reserve.
Meanwhile the Giulietta Sprint, usually a desirable model, was a somewhat frilly lhd example with no UK registration, also stored for many years. An estimate of £6000-£8000 was followed by a top bid of £6480.