Alfa Romeo TZ-TZ2: born to win

VITO WITTING DA PRATO, Giorgio Nada Editore, £60, ISBN 978 88 7911 641 1

‘Can’t see the point of books. It’s all online nowadays.’ That’s something you hear too often from those seeking obscure automotive information. Then a book like this one appears, and the cynics’ case is duly blown to smithereens. We love this type of book, published not to make money but because the author is bursting to spill the story. This tale is about the Alfa Romeo Tubolare Zagato, or TZ, a handsome and successful racing GT from the early 1960s with a lightweight tubular chassis and Alfa’s famous aluminium-block, twin-cam, four-cylinder engine. That the author da Prato, an Americanised Italian most of whose words have nevertheless been translated into English by another, is not a natural structurer of stories is shown by the fact that the TZ isn’t mentioned at all until page 24. Even the story of the TZ’s predecessor, the even prettier (to this writer’s eyes) SZ, doesn’t get going until page 41, with the TZ properly arriving on page 59. Up to then, it’s all about Alfa Romeo’s post-war reconstruction and a side-turning into the author’s time with Alfa 1900s.

But as you gently turn the pages, losing yourself in a spectacular assemblage of archive photographs, engineering sketches, drawings, brochures, reproductions of period magazine articles and more, you can forgive the author’s compulsion to get all the words down, in strictly chronological order, whatever it takes. The richness of detailed history is astonishing, helped by many boxed-out subsidiary stories and Q&As with key figures including Zagato’s Ercole Spada, Autodelta’s Lodovico Chizzola and engine man Giuseppe Busso.

As you would expect in such a definitive book, there are appendices on all 117 TZs and later, crisper-looking TZ2s, detailing which ones had glassfibre bodywork rather than aluminium, the last 17 cars with the lowered chassis, who was the first owner and more. There isn’t a breakdown of motor sport successes and failures, though; you’ll have to read through the 216 shiny, square pages for that, soaking up the delicious page design and the intriguing reproductions of the parts manual.

The story is as much about Autodelta, Alfa’s racing arm, as about the TZ. There’s history, politics, intrigue, the move from Udine to Milan. There’s the evolution from SZ to TZ via the Coda Tronca prototype, forensic analaysis of every component, every happening. Read a few pages over breakfast each day for six months, see the wood through the trees, and you’ll forget the internet completely. JS