ITALIAN SAUCE
Mark Hales tackles Goodwood in the Napolina-sponsored Alfetta that proves why the cars from Milan are such an acquired taste
ALFA ROMEO has always been a niche brand in UK showrooms but, during the 1970s and ’80s, a band of enthusiasts ensured that the number seen on the country’s racetracks and rally stages was out of all proportion to the sales figures. The Alfetta you see in the pictures, built exclusively for the 1981 Tourist Trophy at Silverstone, is ample proof of their dedication to the cause: there was a high-profile race in the UK, there was no UK Alfa representation, and they couldn’t allow that to happen.
The group, collectively known as Dealer Team Alfa – or ‘weekend racers’ in their words – set about building the car from an accidentdamaged Alfetta owned by successful Alfa racer Peter Hilliard. Hilliard would drive the car with Rob Kirby, another Club stalwart, and ice cream magnate and Dealer Team Alfa MD Leo Bertorelli. Turning the car into a Group 2 racer, however, turned out to be more difficult than first anticipated, not because the build was beyond the team’s capabilities but thanks to the number of special parts needed to make the car work. Bertorelli managed to get some out of Italy, while more were found on cars already competing in the UK, which the faithful were willing to surrender for the overall good. Financial support came from Napolina pasta, one of the pool of Italian sponsors that appeared on all the Dealer Team cars. The enterprise may have been amateur in status, but the method was thoroughly democratic and dedicated to the brand’s success on the racetrack rather than any individual’s.
That amateurs would build a car just for one high-profile International race is unusual, but Alfa enthusiasts in general – and Alfa racers in particular – are an unusual breed. Added to which, they had already taken on the establishment at the top National level and done extremely well, so they believed anything was possible. This story is about them as well as the car and, since it’s difficult to separate everything, it’s also about the Alfa Club in the UK, Team Alfa GB and Alfa Romeo as a brand in the UK. The Group 2 Alfetta remains the only one ever built outside Italy.
Group 2? Production Touring Cars, a minimum of 1000 manufactured in any 12-month period, with modifications allowed to dampers, camshaft, carburettors, exhaust manifolds and so on. If history records that
it didn’t fare particularly well at the TT, Hilliard at least went on to drive it successfully in Alfa Club races before it disappeared into obscurity during the 1990s.
NEARLY THREE DECADES ON, the next chapter in the tale starts with Richard Melvin, another lifelong Alfa devotee, whose proper job is as a propmaker in the exhibition and film industry. Richard already had several Alfa projects, including a turbocharged Alfetta that had the wrong wheels. The search for correct ones led him to a two-year-old advert for the ’81 TT racer. If it had the Compomotives, that would be the prize. He found what he describes as ‘a wreck’ living in a container in the wilds of Shropshire, and it didn’t have the wheels but Melvin bought the lot anyway. Then, as so often happens, the possibility of turning the wreck back into a rare footnote in Alfa history seemed more exciting than robbing the remains.
Like many of its ilk, the car had served a number of different roles since the ’81 outing and was sporting a later V6 engine in place of the original 2.0-litre four, and suspension from a 75 saloon instead of its Autodelta set-up. Melvin is clearly energised rather than intimidated by such things, and assisted by the Alfa faithful – many of those originally involved in the project are alive and well – he has returned the car to correct 1981 TT specification, a task that took two years.
More of that was spent sourcing parts and researching the specification than wielding spanners; items such as wings and body panels, Melvin says, are now unobtainable even in Italy and have to be recreated. To my eyes it was worth it; the result is accurate in the period details yet without being any shinier than it was. It is also correct in mechanical specification, which Melvin says involved remanufacturing a large number of parts that Autodelta – Alfa’s official racing division in Italy since 1963 – produced specially for Group 2. So much for an advanced basic specification.
And so to a bright morning at Goodwood, where the wait necessary to keep the ‘noise bucket’ half-empty makes time to survey the subject. The Alfetta’s styling was the work of Giorgietto Giugiaro, for his own ItalDesign concern (he’d shaped the previous Giulia GTV for Bertone). He gave it a contoured, sloping bonnet and steeply raked screen and a cabin that curved gently down to a sharpcut reflexed rear. There’s a lot of careful detailing that manages to avoid looking fiddly and, like so many Alfas over the years, the whole is striking yet timeless. Excepting the folded edges, which were fashionable at the time, it could be a modern car.
As a race model, though, it didn’t look quite as low-slung as I would have expected, and why did the wheels stick out so much? There was good reason for both, as I discover. The inside feels less modern than the outside – little different to many others of the period – and, unlike in a modern Touring Car, much of it remained for the race versions so it’s here today to serve as a reminder. There’s a creaky plastic dash, and a central cubby that, despite the neat stay made from an aircraft aileron turnbuckle, still moves with the gearlever, and a steering wheel that’s too far from the seat and halfway vertical. The once-traditional ‘Italian ape’ driving position was standard-fit but Melvin is something of a different shape so it suits him, whereas I have several floormats rolled up and stuffed between my back and the seat. I can still only just reach the top of the wheel-rim.
More significantly, the preceding GTV’s advanced mechanicals had been retained and developed further for the new model. The allround disc brakes and wishbone suspension were carried over and so were the twin-cam and Webers, but the clutch and five-speed gearbox moved aft under the truncated boot, complete with elaborate de Dion suspension, Watt’s linkage and coil-over-dampers. The rear gearbox was a design layout common among Italian Grand Prix cars of the 1950s, partly for packaging – the engine could go further back in the chassis without moving the driver aft – and with the bonus of spreading the weight within the car’s wheelbase. The downside is that the entire propeller shaft and all its joints spin continuously at the same speed as the engine.
‘A light saloon car, running on stiffer suspension and wearing a set of slicks, is capable of astonishing speed through the corners’
Goodness knows what it cost to produce for the Alfetta but it looked very special when compared with a Ford’s beam axle. Clearly, though, it was a detail about which few buyers cared. Alfa’s UK sales had been going up, from 1600 cars in 1973 to 10,500 in 1976 – an impressive increase in percentage terms – but Ford continued to operate on a different scale, topping the UK sales charts in the same year with 126,300 Cortinas and 134,000 Escorts.
AT LAST, THE LIGHT at the end of Goodwood’s narrow pitlane blinks green, the judder of a race clutch clatters the whirling propshaft yet louder, and the twin-cam coughs, clears its throat in a flurry of fluffed plugs and heads off towards Madgwick. The next bit is the part of the day that always requires a bit of recalibration. Goodwood never fails to get your attention because it’s much as it was in 1950, which is to say the barriers look mighty close as you rush towards Madgwick or No Name or, especially, Woodcote. Even experienced drivers in a rare moment of self-reflection will admit that the first couple of laps sometimes make them wonder why they said they would…
To that we must add the fact that my usual transport is something with 400 horsepower and tall, skinny Dunlops, which bring with them the imminent wonder about just how much persuasion the front will need in order to make it point in. And then, exactly how soon to bring in the power and whether that will spinup an inside wheel and flick the tail. It’s what makes it so exciting, of course, but the Alfetta isn’t like that. The 2.0-litre twin-cam engine pushes out 185 horsepower, respectable for an engine of its time, but less than that available from the diesel powering the Audi A4 in which I arrived. The Alfetta is lighter than an A4, but it doesn’t steam towards Madgwick like a Cobra.
When the Alfetta reaches Madgwick and 7000rpm in fourth, there’s just no drama. No slipping and yawing and drifting, no yelp and howl of a locked inside front, that much because there’s clearly no need to squash the brake pedal. It’s not the first time I’ve experienced this realignment of the senses. A relatively light (in this case 950kg) saloon car, running on stiffer suspension and wearing a set of slicks, is capable of astonishing speed into and through the corners. It’s the lesser difference between the numbers you are carrying and those that go with you into the turn that’s the thing. And, at Goodwood, there’s only one really slow part, so now the job is to work out how little I need to lose in order to get round, rather than how much. It also means I have to be more picky in the assessment because the distinguishing details are less dramatic.
Madgwick is soon the merest of lifts to get the nose in, rather than a heave on the brakes, but there’s still something about the front end that feels strange. And maybe the back too, but I can’t immediately work out what. It just feels as if the corner should be flat, but I’m not inclined to try. I’m not there to set records – even though it’s always tempting to have a go – and I’ve already been there when something finally runs out of travel or binds up in the face of that last bit of effort and pitches me towards the barriers. Best not today. Save it for when we put the race numbers on.
Back in the paddock among the Goodwood pagodas, the ever-cheerful Mr Melvin offers some enlightenment. The front suspension geometry is ‘shit’. The road car’s roll centre, he says, is already below the ground at the front so lowering it even the slightest amount sends it plunging still further and makes the nose ever ready to dive towards a front wheel. The only defence is to prop it all up with stiffer springing
which, in this case, required special torsion bars from Autodelta, who also supplied the special aluminium wishbones, the close-ratio gearsets for the rear-mounted gearbox, the revised Watt’s linkage for the de Dion axle and much else besides.
The parts weren’t easy to get and Alfa GB finance director Jon Dooley’s British Saloon Car opted for a cheaper suspension solution and sat the front suspension firmly on its bump stops so it could barely move. Add to this the Alfetta’s elegant design theory, which had mandated torsion bars in place of coil springs and which ensured that any additional width of wheel had to be offset outwards – hence the grafted-on wheelarch extensions. It has been a source of frustration to many over the years that Alfa Romeo so often opted for the theoretical ideal and the complication and expense that went with it, then didn’t follow through with the smaller details that would make the benefits more obvious.
If the front is stiff then the rear has to be left compliant, something of a familiar saloon car theme at the time, complicated further in this application by the weight of a gearbox in the back. In theory it’s a design bonus because of the 50:50 weight distribution, but difficult to engineer in volume. Alfa tried some 20 variations on the propshaft theme without ever finding a real long-term solution.
Back on track, I begin to sense that the odd feeling from the Alfetta’s back is the pendulumin-waiting caused by gearbox mass combined with a soft rear end and, as I do with the slightly numb front, I learn to overlook it, even use it to help rotate the car and aim it where I want it to go. If only I didn’t have to use the brakes to load the front into the corner, then I wouldn’t lose the speed I had carried so carefully all the way from the Chicane.
It all makes for a different drive, and in a world of conformity it was yet another thing that made Alfa Romeos different, which is why some people – including me – liked them so much. It also created engineering opportunities that the Dealer Team could exploit and, since the rules allowed the use of parts from elsewhere in a diverse model range, that was a bonus unavailable to the likes of Ford, which had focused on the economies of production uniformity. Stuff, says Dooley, such as Rose joints, special trailing arm bushes, aluminium door hinges and so on, all of which would have been fitted to something in the range.
By the early afternoon, the rattle of the propshaft has turned to a chainsaw whine so it’s time to stop before it goes looking for freedom at 7500rpm. Not before I have begun to enjoy and exploit the Alfetta’s slightly unusual feel, though. Using the modern technique – which is to leave the speed on board and trail the brakes all the way into Woodcote and Lavant (the medium-speed corners at Goodwood) – loads the front and allows me to carry the essential extra speed towards the apex. How little braking, rather than how much, is the main consideration here. Traction is excellent and, despite the odd sensation from behind, there is never any hint of a loose tail.
With race-winning Cortinas and their like now fetching more than £100,000, Touring Cars from the 1980s are emerging as a more affordable alternative and they feel a great deal more modern to drive. Alfa expert Chris Snowdon – who has been a great help to Richard Melvin during the car’s return to health – says the set-up isn’t finalised yet, and both he and Dooley reckon the car can be better sorted. They certainly were in period; from the mid-60s onwards, Alfa Romeo claimed more than 30 major Touring Car titles, including the European four times from 1982 to 1985, and the British in 1983.
Melvin plans to use the car as much as possible and reports that the whining propshaft is mainly cured. Dooley quietly mentioned that he lapped the track in the 1980s in something like 1min 28sec, which a few years ago would have sat you on pole for the Revival’s TT Celebration. Probably means he only used the brakes at the chicane. Or he missed it out. Gives me something to aim for, anyway.