Why I’ve never owned an Alfa Romeo | Thank Frankel it’s Friday | GRR
Whisper it because I don’t want to jinx it, but Alfa Romeo is making money. I know. It must have been a while. What is even more encouraging is that the business appears to have turned itself around without any major new product offensive, its Tonale compact SUV yet to go on sale. Most encouraging of all, its boss, Jean-Philippe Imparato, who joined last year and has been responsible for changing Alfa’s fortunes, says he has no interest in chasing volumes any more.
In his view, the old stack ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap business model was never the right one for a brand like Alfa Romeo, and amen to that. I hope with all my heart the people planning the future of Jaguar are watching what happens when a much loved but still niche brand accepts its never going to do massive numbers and decides to earn its profits through margin instead. Which is what Alfa Romeo does now, will do increasingly more in the future and should have been doing for the past 30 years.
I’ve never owned an Alfa and I often wonder why. When I was growing up I spent more time in Alfas than any other make of car – every other put together I should imagine. We were an Alfa family, so there were Berlinas and Alfettas, Suds and Sud Sprints, a Spider and even, get this, a GTV Strada – an endless succession of Milanese metal from my earliest memories right through to adulthood. Perhaps that’s why. I reacted against it.
But I don’t think so, because I’ve never stopped loving them. I’ve raced so many, from a gorgeous little SZ to a monster GTAm, with Giulietta Sprints, Giulia saloons and GTAs between, and rarely have been happier behind the wheel. Those twin cam cars of the 750, 101 and 105 series are to me among the greatest cars of all time.
However, I did once come very close indeed. The car I always wanted was an early ‘step front’ 105-series Sprint GT from about 1964. It was then as it is now the finest Alfa Romeo a person of conventional means could hope to afford. It has that gorgeous Bertone styling, the 1,570cc version of the classic Alfa twin cam motor, a beautiful five-speed gearbox and disc brakes at every corner. You may be stunned to learn this little 1.6-litre, four-cylinder Alfa cost similar money in period to an E-type Jaguar, but you realise why when you drive it.
The other great draw for me is that the major mechanical components are simple and reliable, bits are cheap and plentiful and there are Alfa specialists everywhere ready, willing and able to look after them. So really what matters is the condition of the structure and, unlike a GTA, steel body.
About five years ago, after many years of casually flitting around the relevant websites, I found the car. It was blue, which I loved, and neither a show queen nor a bag of bolts. It appeared to be in good but not great condition, a car you’d be proud to own but not too precious to drive. Which was precisely what I wanted.
So I rang up and instead of spouting the usual nonsense about looking at lots of cars and only buying the best, I asked the vendor to describe it to me, then said I’d come down and if I liked it, I’d drive it away. We agreed a price subject to inspection and I even got a bankers’ draft ready for the amount to take with me.
All I took in addition to that was my brother, who knows a thing or ten about these cars. We found the house, met the seller and were delighted to see that in the large garage where the car was kept, a large inspection pit had been sunk into the ground. Everything we could see on the car was as described, and it didn’t take long underneath it to see it was the same under there.
The engine started easily, held good oil pressure and the owner was happy for me to run it up the road. Dynamically, I’d say it was fair to middling. The engine wasn’t the sweetest, it spluttered a bit at low revs and ran out breath quite early on. The handling felt slightly wooden too, and the ride not as good as I’d expected. But none of this bothered me. To me these were classic symptoms of a perfectly decent and perhaps even very good car that’s simply not been used enough. I was optimistic that with little more than a decent run, perhaps a rolling road session, some fresh shocks, new oil in the steering box, a decent set of tyres and maybe some suspension bushes, a wonderful car was there for the taking.
So why didn’t I buy it? The silliest reason of all. I didn’t like the man selling it to me. I know: if it was the right car, who cares about the name on the cheque? But while perfectly business-like, he wasn’t in the least bit friendly. He neither said nor did anything to suggest this car was anything other than a possession he wanted to be shot of, and the fact the car had clearly been sitting around for quite some time supported that view. And while I hoped and thought it likely it was no more than a simple tune-up away from the car of my dreams, I couldn’t say I knew that to be the case. And it was a lot of money to spend on what was, ultimately, a hunch. I turned to my brother who said, ‘it’s not quite right, is it?’ And in that as in many other regards, he was entirely correct.