OCTANE CARS
Evan Klein’s Alfa Giulia gets road legal; beware Land Rover thieves; tweaks for Coucher’s XK
I’VE NEVER BEEN so content going slow. I don’t think I ever saw the other side of 60. I was cruising in Los Angeles, and I even took the long way through Beverly Hills. This was the first shakedown of the Giulia and I was taking her to the Department of Motor Vehicles to get her registered, and the motor was running so quiet I thought at times it had died. I started to wonder if this was what Alfas were supposed to be like.
Since I first picked the car up on 31 July, the bodyshop has put new floorpans in, pulled out the dents and blended the paint. I managed to polish the chrome right off the front bumper, down to the brass, so it was off to the chromer with the bumper. I have to admit it does look better. The missing headlight rings were the hardest to source: reproductions just don’t fit properly. I finally got a set of originals, thanks to the Alfa Romeo community, which really comes to bat.
One of the first things I had done was to order custom seats, since they would take longest to arrive. However, they turned out to be too small for the car and looked silly. So we took a set of seats from a 1991 Alfa, recovered them in the original red, and they look fabulous. We replaced the exhaust and put on a new set of springs and shocks all round. I scrubbed the original carpet in the back yard. The hardest part was fitting the wiper motor, which is a Lucas part wedged behind the glove box and fan motor, and necessitates a lot of painful on-your-back-under-thedash stuff. Amazingly, though, everything electrical now works.
Of course, no Alfa story is complete without a trip on the flatbed. Friday afternoon, I’d just left the shop and was on the freeway in stop-and-go LA traffic when the brakes started acting funny until they completely locked up. I felt it coming and headed to the median [central reservation], where she came to rest. The pads had worn out and the pistons in the calipers got stuck. Getting the pistons to go back in was easy; trying to find a set of pads for a ’66 Alfa Giulia with Girling discs was a bit harder, but not impossible, and by 6pm I was back on the road.
I hired detailers to scrub the paint and get it looking a little more inviting, and took the Alfa to the Petersen Museum early Sunday morning for a cruise-in, then off to the Art Center College of Design show. I arrived late and snuck her into the far corner. Curious eyes came over and gave her the seal of approval – ‘Leave her just like that, don’t paint her, she’s so original.’ I felt so proud.
After a long day in the sun I pulled in front of my house and took a moment: I rubbed the seats, touched the vintage gauges and inhaled the aroma of car. Then I went into the house, sat at my desk and gazed at her through the window. The phone rang; it was my neighbour Jim. ‘I just saw the Giulia, she’s amazing!’ I lay in bed that night thinking, I can’t sell her, but what am I going to do with two Alfas? Do you think my wife would mind if I had a Duetto, too?
‘NO ALFA STORY IS COMPLETE WITHOUT A JOURNEY ON A FLATBED – I WAS ON THE FREEWAY WHEN THE BRAKES COMPLETELY LOCKED-UP’