Alfa Romeo Alfasud | Spotted
Buying any Alfasud comes with a health warning. But what a car...
I have a memory of the Alfa Romeo Alfasud that, wait for it, doesn't involve watching one disintegrate into millions of tiny brown particles before my very eyes. Yes, rusting was one the Alfasud's preeminent features that made them perfect for illustrating the theory of entropy to science students, but it wasn't the only thing that made the car famous. My memory was, as a wee lad, being driven in an Alfasud Ti Green Cloverleaf and feeling - from the passenger seat at least - that this was the best-handling car since the McLaren MP4-4. And thinking that it was one of the best-looking cars I'd ever seen, too. Naïve? Of course. But a cherished memory nonetheless.
The little Alfa was an inspired piece of design and engineering. The Mk1 Golf GTI was the genesis of the hot hatchback, but the Alfasud represented the first sporting front-wheel-drive hatchback - albeit with one tiny bone of contention, which was that it wasn't a hatchback at all. The first series of cars were, in fact, saloons with a hatchback shape, but that didn't stop them being incredibly practical. It was engineered by Rudolf Hruska, and the Austrian insisted that its young designer - one Giorgetto Giugiaro - made the boot big enough to swallow a set of large suitcases. Which it did, with enough space for four adults and more rear leg room than a contemporary Jaguar XJ6, too - from a car that was just shy of 13-feet long. And it did that while also boasting a collapsible steering column, crumple zones and a fuel tank that was mounted farther from harm under the rear seat. Packaging wise, it was a masterpiece.
As was the technical brief that Hruska set himself. A front-wheel-drive Alfa had been mooted since the '50s but never materialised due to a gentlemen's agreement that Alfa wouldn't step on Fiat's mass-market toes. The Alfasud was, at last, a democratised Alfa Romeo for blue collars and upwards. But as an Alfa it had to be born with a sporting soul. So Hruska used a four-cylinder, horizontally opposed engine that kept the weight down low and the frontal section small. It worked, because with a 0.30-drag coefficient the tiny 1,186cc engine could still deliver excellent motorway cruising. It was a sweet-revving motor as well, and, thanks to the car's rack-and-pinion steering - a first for the brand - the Alfasud steered sweetly, too. Plus it handled with poise on its MacPherson front struts and rear beam axle, with inboard disc brakes keeping the unsprung mass low.
As a result, it blew its rivals clean out the water dynamically and received a rapturous reception by the press. Even those sceptics that believed a front-wheel-drive Alfa was sacrilegious were won over by the car's obvious charm. Of course, there were many upgrades along the way, including bigger iterations of the flat-four that culminated in the Ti Quadrifoglio Verde - the car that wowed me. By that stage the original car's simplistic lines had been augmented with eight-hole alloys, rubber bumpers, wheel-arch extensions, deeper sills and a rear spoiler. And, by then, a more practical hatchback. Unlike the Spider, though, which went from boat-tail beauty to a little ungainly, the Alfasud retained its prettiness despite the '80s excess.
This car isn't quite that far down the evolutionary path. It's a 1983 1.5 Ti Gold Cloverleaf, which hasn't got the bigger arches and is fitted with more delicate, multi-spoked alloys. Inside there's plush, tan velour and a beautiful wood-rimmed steering wheel that wouldn't look out of place fitted to an Alfa from two decades earlier. And being a Gold Cloverleaf, the twin-carb, 1,490cc motor, which according to the advert was rebuilt 15,000-miles ago, produces a healthy 95hp and comes with a five-speed manual gearbox.
Of course, the Alfasud's legacy will always be tainted with the colour brown. Yet this stunning piece of silverware shows no signs of that and is a welcome reminder not to allow the Alfasud's poor execution to completely overshadow its fundamentally excellent engineering.
Specification | Alfa Romeo Alfasud Ti Gold Cloverleaf
Engine: 1,490cc, 4-cylinder, naturally aspirated
Transmission: 5-speed manual, front-wheel drive
Power (hp): 95
Torque (lb ft): 95 (approx.)
CO2: N/A
MPG: N/A
Recorded mileage: 112,000
Year registered: 1983
Price new: N/A
Yours for: £19,950
Post-pandemic pricing is indeed still post-pandemic pricing.
Next stop 205 GTI 1.9….. happy days.
Miss both.
My old dad would be stunned.
He bought an Alfasud 1.3 Ti in 1978 to back up our existing SAAB 99L - quite a respectable seventies garage and definitely one to teach you about the dynamic traits of dead beam axles. To 8 year old me, the Alfasud was so exciting, like a little racing car with its noisy, farty exhaust. The following summer we took it on holiday in France and drove down the Mulsanne Straight. I took a photo from between the front seats to preserve the moment: sun shining, foot down, exhaust blaring and the row of gauges to dad's left - 'olio', 'benzina', 'acqua' - visible below the windscreen and the strip of tarmac stretching into the distance. The photo came out well and it's a precious motoring memory highlight of my childhood.
We had XYE10T for 2-3 years until more babies came along and had to get something bigger (a rather crappy Fiat Mirafiori estate... but dad had redeemed himself by replacing the 99L with a SAAB 900 turbo in 1980). According to gov.uk, the 'Sud died in 1987.
Around £5k on a good day would be closer to the mark.
7-8k is baseline for a similar condition cooking 1.2.
However, I do think 20k is steep for one of these and I much prefer the Sprint version.
Kept it for 2 years (most of the time sat on my parents' driveway going nowhere). At one point I had both the Alfa and a Fiat X1/9 (glutton for punishment), the two together equated to just about one reliable daily driver.
Mine did NOT rust. Nope. Not while I owned it anyway. Which wasn't for long after it caught fire on the way to Snetterton because the scrote that owned it before me saw fit to fill the hole in the spare wheel well with an oily rag. Guess what's beneath the wheel well? The hot exhaust, of course.
Other memories are of spectacular lift-off oversteer and the weird heater controls that were on a column stalk...
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