The Alfasud was flawed but utterly brilliant – Thank Frankel it’s Friday | GRR
Last week I borrowed a Ferrari from a man who owns a lot of Ferraris. Some not that expensive or important, others quite exceptionally expensive and important. And in the middle of the shoot we found ourselves in a pub car park with a photographer who needed at least 20 minutes to set up his next shot. So we retired inside to get a cup of coffee. Where we found we shared a mutual love of a certain car some distance removed in concept and price – if not geography – from the exotic world of Maranello. The humble Alfasud.
I grew up in the back of an endless succession of ‘Suds. Those I can remember include a 1.2 Ti, 1.3 Ti, a 1.5 Ti, a hatchback 1.5 Ti Veloce, a Super and at least two Sprints. And, to be honest, when I was a child I wasn’t that knocked out by them, a state of mind that existed until the day my father chanced across one of those newfangled Golf GTi things in his 1.3 Ti and could only watch helplessly as the German car disappeared into the distance. Thereafter I hated them.
In fact I’d probably never have grown to love them but for an older brother who started racing Suds with the Alfa Romeo Owners Club and found in me a happy helper who’d go along, hold spanners and generally get in the way. He owned some road ‘Suds too, some with engines from wrecked race cars which on rare occasions I would be allowed to borrow.
And once I started driving them, rather than merely being thrown around in the back of them, I understood what all the fuss was about.
In the early 1970s these cars must have appeared as from another planet relative to what passed for opposition before the Golf turned up and spoiled the party. No wonder Suds won every group test I read. My Dad’s 1.2 Ti probably dated from around 1975 and came with its own unique flat-four engine with an overhead camshaft on each back, rack and pinion steering, a beam axle with a Watts linkage literally decades before Vauxhall got around to doing the same with the Astra and disc brakes at all four corners, those in the front mounted inboard to reduce unsprung mass.
It's true that ‘Suds are not especially fast, even the last with 105bhp, 1.5-litre engines that were slightly spoiled by Michelin TRX tyres which looked a whole lot better than they performed. But these cars were never about pure speed, unless you’re talking point to point pace because you rarely had to slow for anything.
You’d just wait for Rudi Hruska’s fizzing flat-four to get you up to some meaningful velocity, and then just chuck it at the countryside. To this day I don’t think I’ve driven a front-wheel-drive car with better steering than this, and the balance was such that you could carry an excess of speed into the corner on a trailing throttle and trust the car somehow to have shed it all by the apex. It was great that it had those disc brakes, but the truth was you very rarely needed them. And those engines! You could park the rev-counter needle in the red – and I often did – yet they never, ever broke.
Of course the Alfasud was a car with a few inherent problems such as poor ergonomics, a pedal box only a ballet dancer would love and the absence of a hatchback for most of its life. But all this paled next to the rust issue for which they became so rightly infamous. And don’t let anyone tell you the later hatchbacks were ok in this regard, because they weren’t and I speak as someone who watched them dissolving outside the house at the time. Better perhaps, OK certainly not.
Sadly this means very few Alfasuds survive. In the UK the How Many Left website counts fewer than 100 cars of all kinds and that includes those that are SORNed, which I’m ready to bet is a big majority.
But my encounter has left me with a fresh urge to drive one again. So the next time I’m in my new found friend’s neck of the woods, I’m not going to ask to borrow one of his Ferraris, but his apparently immaculate Ti. And if he says yes, you’ll be the first to hear about it.