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I enjoy a proper pizza, not one of your supermarket cardboard variety, there is nothing to beat one from an Italian Restaurant, it is the same with cars, nobody manages to replicate the true Italian style.
You can of course say Ferrari, no, I am talking about cars that real people use, Lancia, Fiat and Alfa Romeo, the bread and butter cars.
One car stands out as something really special, the Alfasud, the car that helped regenerate the economy of southern Italy. Not only that, it change the concept of the small car as well.
Alfa was given sufficient incentives to build a new factory near Naples, and the project became the baby for Rudolf Hruska who had worked on the VW Beetle, and Porsche, actually the Sud part of the Alfa name represents the “South”.
Before getting involved with the technical side of things, Alfa built in excess of half a million Suds, plus 200,000 Sud GT and GTV’s and Sprints. Those figures come from one source yet others quote 906,734 and over one million which are very different, However it was a very popular car.
The designs of which resulted from Bertones Giugiaro’s work at Italdesign, now where have I seen that name mentioned.. The body of the Alfasud was something to die for, it was like a Sophie Loren on wheels, I doubt if the lady would be flattered with that comment, though she should be.
The first Alfasud rolled out of the factory in 1972, it had a flat four 1186cc engine, coupled to a front wheel drive, it had 0-60 time of 14.1secs and a top speed of 93mph, from a drivers point of view this baby had fantastic road holding, it was a joy to get behind the wheel, chuck ability might describe the handling.
In 1977 a 1286cc unit was put in, within the year 1350cc and 1490cc units appeared, there was no end to the Alfasud, top speed increased to 99mph for the 1350cc unit and 103mph for the larger of the two, there was a Ti model using the 1490cc engine which was officially rated at 109mph.
However before going any further Alfa had a few problems, firstly the government virtually making it impossible for Alfa not to build a new factory in an area where there was no previous car building expertise, so you could hardly expect quality building, then the Italian government ordered recycled steel from Russia which was not of a particularly good quality, yep Alfasuds had rust problems, serious ones, it is said that cars coming out of the showroom were already rusting. Alfa tried to deal with the problem by injecting foam into cavities, this only exacerbated the problem the cars started rusting from the inside.
Eventually the problem was solved but Alfa had a lot to live down, that apart the Alfasud as a car outshone all other European cars, it was the original hot hatch before the saying was coined.
The very sad part of this story is that there are only about 100 suds left in the UK, so if you have one you are lucky, it is now a very rare but desirable motor.
The suspension of the sud, at the front, independent coil spring with an anti roll bar, at the back a rigid axle, a panhard rod and coil springs, steering is rack and pinion, the Sude also got a five speed gear box. Driven with care and you would get 30 mpg, however the Sud would be a very difficult car to drive sedately. At least you got servo assisted front and rear disc brakes, in fact one would say the Alfasud was extremely well equipped, laminated windscreen, tinted glass, two speed wipers with intermittent wipe, low profile radial tyres, halogen headlights, reclining seats with adjustable headrests, cloth upholstery, carpets and twin tone horns.
Four people could travel in reasonable comfort, sourcing this information one finds all sorts of amusing tales, one that involved Alfa was the ban on buying non EU meat, apparently Australia supplied meat to Italy, to get round this ban a deal was worked out between the Australian government and the Italian that Australia would supply so much meat in exchange for 2000 Alfa’s but it never got off the ground, idea was good.
There is no mention of a radio, well Alfa considered that the sort of person buying the Sud would probably want to fit their own system rather than have a mass produced one, just love it.
Ted Lay tedlay@gmail.com
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