Before there was Ferrari, there was Alfa Romeo. Enzo Ferrari started his little car company after World War II, but 25 years earlier, he was a team driver at Alfa Romeo, and went on to set up his own racing team fielding Alfas a few years later. Ferrari’s team eventually became the de facto Alfa Romeo race team when the company withdrew the factory team for financial reasons in 1933. Alfa won their first world championship in 1925, they won Le Mans with the 8C four years in a row in the first half of the 30s, and won the Mille Miglia 10 out of the 11 years between 1928 and 1938. They also won two F1 championships in the early 1950s before withdrawing from racing again.
Before the war and into the early postwar period, Alfa made relatively small numbers of premium cars with large (by European standards) engines. Even as far back as the 1920s, they were twin-cam units, supercharged in the spicy variants, which dominated on the race track and were among the most desirable road cars in the world. They were the Ferraris of their time.
After the war, however, demand for this type of car was low, especially in Europe where reconstruction and gasoline shortages were the order of the day, rather than exotic high-performance cars. BMW found themselves in a similar predicament, making big expensive cars in small numbers, a problem which they solved by buying the license to manufacture an Italian microcar, the Isetta. Alfa’s solution was different: they designed a car that brought all of the traditional Alfa Romeo virtues to the market in a smaller and much more affordable package, creating a car that saved the company and became a legend. It was the Giulietta. Even the story behind the name is the stuff of legend: apparently a Russian prince visiting the factory noted the presence of many Romeos working, and remarked that there weren’t enough Juliets, and so the new small car was called Gulietta to provide some gender balance at the Alfa Romeo factory.
The centerpiece of the Giulietta was an all-new 1300cc twin-cam inline-4 designed by Giuseppe Busso. The engine was absolutely bleeding edge for the time: in addition to having dual overhead cams, it featured all-alloy construction, hemispherical combustion chambers, and a forged crankshaft. Its production lasted from 1954 to 1994, a testament to the sophistication and inherent goodness of the design.
It’s hard to overstate the impact of the Giulietta. It was a shocking breath of fresh air. While British sports cars looked like overgrown bicycles and drove like tractors, and Porsches were barely beyond the VW Beetle stage, the Alfa Romeo was new and exotic, both aesthetically and technically. Two door variants got gorgeous Bertone or Pininfarina styling and the cars were just the right size and price for the glamor-hungry but still war-ravaged European market, while also being ideally suited to the emerging American craze for European sports cars. And all this presented with the charming Dolce Vita romance that brought a slice of Italy wherever a Giulietta appeared.
A displacement increase to 1600cc resulted in a name change to Giulia for 1962, by which time the car’s replacement was being readied, the Giulia GT. As with its predecessor, the closed version was styled by Bertone, specifically Giorgetto Giugiaro. It looked modern but not fussy, while under the skin, it was also exciting, with the now familiar twin-cam engine, plus 5-speed transmission and disc brakes all around, a set of features which neither Ferrari nor Porsche could match when the Giulia GT appeared in 1963.
Although Alfa Romeo had stopped its factory race efforts after its two F1 championship wins in the early 50s, private teams actively and successfully raced their cars for the rest of the 50s and into the 60s. They racked up countless wins in the 1.3 liter class, particularly with the Zagato bodied variant of the Giulietta, the SZ. By the early 60s, Alfa was looking to get back into factory-supported racing and turned to Carlo Chiti, who had worked for Alfa before they stopped racing in the early 50s and spent most of the intervening years at Ferrari.
The racing outfit Autodelta was founded in 1961, and by 1963, it was officially part of Alfa Romeo. Under Chiti’s leadership, Autodelta was tasked with returning Alfa to the forefront of global motor racing, which they attempted with three cars, initially the purpose-built TZ to run in the GT class, then the production derived GTA to run in saloon car racing, and later on, the 33, which ran as a sports prototype. The 33 met with limited success later in its life but the TZ and GTA proved to be absolutely dominant, the TZ at high profile international sports car races like Le Mans, Sebring, Targa Florio and the Tour de France, and the GTA in touring car races.
One of the most important things about running the GTA in the touring car class was that it had to race against the outstanding Lotus Cortina, a dramatically re-engineered Ford Cortina driven by some of the very best drivers in the business. And so Autodelta didn’t mess around when it came to the development of the GTA.
They started with the A for alleggerita or “lightened”, and this letter was not applied lightly. At 1800 pounds, the GTA weighs 500 pounds less than the Giulia GT’s 2300 pounds, and this was achieved by changing…everything. The weight reduction was achieved by removing sound proofing and fitting plastic windows, but the biggest weight savings came from remanufacturing most of the car’s body out of Peraluman 25, an exotic alloy of aluminum, magnesium, copper, zinc, and manganese. Almost every part of the car’s body was made out of the stuff, save for the inner structure and the floor pans, although they tried to make the floor pans out of Peraluman 25 but it proved too fragile to endure the forces of the driver’s seat and the occasional contact with the ground during races.
Additional weight was saved throughout the rest of the car: the valve cover, timing cover, bell housing, and high capacity oil sump were all made of magnesium. The car also gained hollow half shafts, aluminum suspension components, and drilled gears and hollow shafts inside the gearbox. The engine was upgraded with the full host of good old fashioned hot-rodding tricks: twin plug ignition, revised cam profiles, head work, twin 45mm Weber carburetors, higher compression pistons, strengthened connecting rods, and carefully balanced internals, which raised power from 105hp to 150hp in race trim without any increase in displacement.
Although it is visually quite similar to the standard car, the long list of changes reflects the fantatical attention with which the GTA was developed. The changes were extremely purposeful and paid dividends on track. The car’s first racing outings were in 1965, where periodic driver errors and mechanical troubles kept it from dominating. 1966 however was a breakout year, with the season beginning with wins at Monza in Italy and Sebring in Florida, where a surprise upset victory by Jochen Rindt in the 4-hour Trans Am race against large displacement American cars including a Mustang driven by AJ Foyt set the tone for a series of giant-killing performances. This was all the more remarkable because Rindt won in a GTA that his co-driver had rolled during practice!
In America, the GTA went on to win the 1966 and 1970 Trans-Am under 2 liter class championship, while in Europe, the car won the Touring Car Manufacturers’ Championship five times, often keeping up with cars with much larger displacement such as the BMW 3.0 CSL. It’s impossible to chronicle all the wins the GTA accumulated, both on circuits and in rallies around the world, but the car was an absolute force, a demonstration of how obsessive development of every system in the car yielded one of the most successful touring car racers of all time.
In order to homologate the car to race, 500 examples of the GTA had to be constructed, many of which were originally street-trimmed cars sold to the public. Their exotic spec made them expensive, especially for a 4 cylinder car displacing less than 2 liters, but what buyers got in exchange was an exceptionally focused and pure car, a genuine race car for the road.
