My Alfa Romeo Adventure

While in Italy I followed the Alfa Romeo racing cars on their road rallies. I also was able to attend the Grand Prix at Monte Carlo and Monza to watch Formula 1, but preferred the swift little stock vehicles made by the Italian manufacturer Alfa Romeo.

I bought a Silver Gray 1968 Alfa Guilia GT Junior Veloce 1300 from a friend and reconditioned it for the trip back to the US. This was going to be my speedy junior car to the powerful Corvette. To make a very long story short, I totaled the Alfa in Port Erie, Canada enroute from the Baltimore port via Rochester, NY and Niagara Falls. I was thrown from the car but lucking escaped with only minor injuries because the door came off with my body against it and suffered much more damage than I did, even though the blast had knocked me out of my shoes.

Being a UniBody Frame, it would have been prohibitive to repair and would have performed poorly had we done it. So I had the engine and transmission removed,and junked out the car. The most cherished part of the car were the Weber carburetors, which were stored in a gun safe until I could get them safely home.

Incredibly I found an Alfa GT, a very rare vehicle in the US, only 6 blocks from our home in St. Paul, and it happened to be without an engine! I scarfed it up and stored it in the garage until I had time to check it out. Well, it was laden underneath with Minnesota road salt and it did not justify the off-chassis renovation like that which I would do on the Vette. So I sold it to a collector from Illinois.

The final chapter in this not-so-rewarding saga was to place the valuable drive train with a racing enthusiastic fellow who would eventually put it in a racing Lancia Beta with a finely tuned engine competing in the under 1.5 liter category.

Photos showing the brief love affair that I had with Alfa Romeo: