Rare Birds from Alfa and Lancia: First Boulder Classics & Coffee of 2023

We arrived around 8 this morning to find 8th Street south of Pearl lined with old cars, and a sizable crowd puzzling over seldom-seen creations like this Alfa Romeo SZ, also known as the ES-30, which was based on Alfa's 204 hp, 3.0 liter SOHC V6 engine  and rear-transaxle Model 75 chassis.  The SZ was styled by former Citroen designer Robert Opron, and when it appeared in 1989 some thought he must have been in a less-sentimental mood than when he designed the Citroen SM with its gentle curves.  No gentle curves here; the SZ looks like it might eat other cars for breakfast, and the composite body panels assembled by Zagato earned the car the nickname Il Mostro (the monster).

Only one color scheme was available on the SZ which Alfa offered from 1989-'91: the red with gray roof seen here.  From 1992-'94, Alfa offered an RZ convertible version with three color options.  The blunt, cubic form of Il Mostro's tail contrasts with the gentle curves of its Ferrari Dino and Chevy Corvette neighbors.  

We soon found another rare visitor from Italy's Golden Age of eccentric design, but in the case of this 1972 Lancia Fulvia 1600HF, the evidence of wild nonconformism was mostly under the hood. The front-drive Fulvia features a narrow-angle (around 13 degrees) twin-cam alloy V4 tilted over at 45 degrees so the transaxle could drive equal-length half-shafts, reducing torque steer...

The result  was a tightly-packed engine room with the radiator casually tossed off to one side.  All-powerful Lancia engineers were adept at tossing mechanicals around; they'd built a successful Formula 1 racing car with the engine and driveshaft angled at 12 degrees to the car's centerline, all so the driver could sit lower, and rear transaxle for 50-50 balance. Perfectionists in the engineering dept. altered the angle between cylinders twice (by a degree or so) during Fulvia production, with the final (expensive) adjustment happening on this 1.6 liter HF model, which developed 115 hp in standard trim, but up to 160 in rally form...

And what, you ask, does HF* signify?  It means High Fidelity; but Lancia wasn't talking about the stereo system. They were honoring their customers; those who had repeatedly placed orders for new Lancias were rewarded with priority on the waiting list for the high-performance HF series of cars, which eventually included the mid-mounted Dino V6 powered Stratos HF, winner of the World Rally Championship.  Lancia was taken over by Fiat in 1969, and the Fulvia stayed in production until 1976.  Barely visible in the photo below is the subtle concave arc of the rear bumper and deck edge...

Engineering on the '62 Porsche Twin-Grille Roadster was already pretty familiar by the time it was bodied by D'Iteren Freres in Belgium.  One of under 250 examples of the model built, it was the last of a line of Type 356 roadsters built by Porsche.  Successors to the side-curtained, removable-windshield Speedsters, the roadsters featured wind-up side windows but were more adaptable to weekend club racing than the cushier 356 cabriolets with their body-colored windshield frames...

There were lots of other Porsches on view, including water-cooled modern 911s with rear engine locations (the white car pictured), and a mid-engined Cayman GT4 (not pictured).  And what appeared to be a black Ferrari wagon lurking in the background.  More on that later...

A more familiar Ferrari shape was this Dino 246 GT coupe from 1968.  It's a frequent visitor to these Sunday events, but it's so pretty we don't need an excuse to have another look.  A mid-mounted 2.4 liter, 65-degree V6 sits crosswise under the rear deck (the reason for the concave rear window) and drives the rear wheels through a 5-speed transaxle.

The Dino is no less graceful from the front, and is a reminder that when Ferrari first offered road cars to the public, they were small, lightweight vehicles, with engines at first limited to 2 liters (though they had 12 cylinders back in 1949).

The Alfa Romeo GTV6 shown below also featured a V6 of similar size, as well as a 5-speed transaxle, but in this case the engine was at the front and the transmission at the rear in a successful bid for 50-50 weight distribution. The Alfetta series coupes were designed by Giugiaro and introduced in 1974 with Alfa's famed twin-cam four; the lightly restyled GTV6 appeared in 1980 and continued until 1987.  It's parked next to a BMW 325 from the same era.

Alfa's earlier, more famous GTV style, also by Giugiaro, but while he worked at Bertone, appeared in 1964 and continued in production for over a decade, overlapping the Alfetta series transaxle cars. The silver car below is a late one, powered by a 2 liter version of  Alfa's classic, all-aluminum twin-cam inline four.  It's parked next to another car with an aluminum engine; this one is a 1962 Oldsmobile F-85 Cutlass convertible, with 215 cubic inch V8.

Other visitors to the show included a Lotus Seven as well as the new mid-engined Corvette, both covered in earlier Classics & Coffee posts.  The Seven would have been the lightest car at the event, were it not for a repeat appearance by a twin-cylinder Steyr Puch*.  Near show's end, we prepared for doses of coffee and jazz as the band Espresso tuned up at Spruce Confections, and one family went motoring off in this Ferrari wagon. Not exactly a station wagon like the old Volvo 240 in the background, but an attempt at a bit of practicality to go with all the noise and expense of a Ferrari, the GTC4 Lusso appeared in 2016, and was offered with V12 power and all-wheel drive.  A year later, there was a Lusso T variant with a turbocharged V8 and rear-wheel drive...

Our highly informal Best of Show award, though, goes to Frank Barrett's Lancia Fulvia 1600 HF because of its immaculate condition, combined with the cheeky audacity of its engineering. You may have doubts, because after all it was the fact that Lancia's engineering dept. was in firm control of the company (or, according to their accounting dept., totally out of control) that ended Lancia's financial independence. But on the way to that bankruptcy, Lancia's engineers* provided conversation starters for a thousand cars and coffee events around the world. The next Classics and Coffee in Boulder is scheduled for May 28; the season schedule is on view at fuelfed.wordpress.com.

Photo Credits:  All photos, including the bad ones, are by the author.

*Footnotes:

Further  notes on the Lancia HF rally cars appear in this blog in "Hi-Fi: Racing Red Elephants" from October 3, 2016.  The D Series Lancia race cars are discussed in "Prancing Elephants: Lancia's D Series in the Heroic Days of Road Racing", from October 8, 2016.  We had a look at that 2-cylinder Steyr Puch in our October 31, 2022 post: "Last Boulder Classics & Coffee of the Season:  A 1931 Bugatti Charms Children of All Ages."

Roadside Attraction: Carhenge----Stonehenge Rendered in Cars (Really)

Just under 4 miles north of the downtown center of Alliance, on Nebraska Route 87 (County Road 59) you will happen upon Carhenge.  And even if this place had another name, you'd probably think of Stonehenge right away.  None of this is a coincidence...

Jim Reinders used 39 cars to form his sculptural homage to his recently departed father and to the epic ruin on Salisbury Plain.  Family and friends helped out, and it took a team of nearly 3 dozen to complete the work, which opened in 1987.  The team painted all the cars in the same stoney shade of matte gray, a good move as it avoids the distractions of contrasting paint schemes and bright trim. It also focuses attention on form, something that's been lost at the earlier Cadillac Ranch in Texas, where graffiti and vandalism have blunted the impact of ten Fin Era Cadillacs buried nose down.  At Carhenge, you get to concentrate on mass, space and light...

For a comparison of the proportions and massing of Carhenge with the Sarcen Circle at Stonehenge, see the photo below.  The Sarcen Circle is a dozen feet larger in diameter than Carhenge, at 108 feet.  Seventeen of the original thirty upright "standing stones" remain after about 5,000 years of wear and tear...

As it turns out, choosing cars (at least, American cars) as his basic building block was another of the artist's good moves.  The vertical stones at Stonehenge are about 13 feet high and 7 feet wide.  To achieve the same height, Reinders buried "standard size" (that is, huge) cars of the Sixties up to 5 feet in the ground*.  Well, a '62 Buick Wildcat is 18 feet long; bury one 5 feet and you're left with 13 feet up to your horizontal "stone."  Perfect.  And Caddies, Chryslers and Lincolns of this era were around 80 inches wide, nearly the 7 feet of the standing stones.  Cars acting as beams span these verticals and are welded in place.  In the shot below, we see a Ford Fairlane of the '66-'67 period following a Chevelle from the same era, just as it did in so many suburban shopping center lots...

As with the original on the Salisbury Plain, some verticals are missing their horizontal attachments.  This enhances the overall ruin effect...

At Carhenge, cars play the roles of three trilithons within the circle, as well as heel stones, slaughter stone and two station stones.  We're nervous about that slaughter stone...

As a work of art, Carhenge resonates with all kinds of associations. One thinks of the transitory nature of material things, notices the welcome stillness after the highway's unending rush to somewhere (or nowhere), or maybe (if one is old enough) ponders how cool tail fins looked once when their bright metallic colors reflected the showroom lights...and how they seem kind of silly today. 

If you've spent a lot of time working under cars on a lift, you may be able to ID the supporting piers below.  As for the cars acting as lintels, we note an early 70s Ford Pinto leading a Fifties Willys Jeep pickup and an early 60s Plymouth Valiant...  

Below, a '55 Caddy dominates the foreground, with a Virgil Exner-designed 1960 Plymouth on the background pedestal, another of 3 trilithons within the circle.  Since the 1987 completion of Carhenge, the facility has opened an outdoor sculpture gallery called the Car Art Reserve.  A visitor center called the Pit Stop was added in 2007. Jim Reinders gifted the 10 acre Carhenge site to the Friends of Carhenge, who maintained it until 2013, when it was given to the City of Alliance.  It's open dawn to dusk.

Jim Reinders, who died in 2021, was born in Alliance in 1927, served in the U.S. Navy in the South Pacific during World War 2, and graduated from the University of Nebraska in 1948. His work as an engineer for the oil industry took him to England eventually, and that was apparently a high point of his travels, because he was drawn to those mysterious stones, placed long before the druids or the Celts arrived on the Salisbury Plain...

Reinders liked talking about his art, and when asked why he'd spent so much effort on Carhenge, answered "Why not?"  In the poster below, he sits happily in a mid-Seventies Chevy Vega wagon, a car which was not usually known to delight its drivers.  

Carhenge, however, has delighted thousands of human and canine visitors over the decades. Our friend Pablo visited on a windy day, and looked ready to take off with the breeze, unlike the thoroughly grounded '68 Caddy behind him.  Visitor information is available at carhenge.com, and the Visitor Center phone is 308-762-5400.

 

*Footnote:  Background information on the creation of Carhenge, along with details of other art installations and tourist amenities on the site, are available at carhenge.com.  

Roadside archeologists, and those interested in sculptural landmarks made of objects never intended for that purpose, may be interested in "Roadside Attraction: Little Man and Big Dog in Denver", posted here on May 14, 2016.  Little Man Ice Cream is housed in a 28-foot high metal cream can, and the 20-foot high Big Dog sculpture is covered with 90,000 dog tags.  Hound About Town Pablo is a fan of Little Man, but harbors some doubts about Big Dog...

Photo Credits

All color shots of Carhenge (and loyal hound Pablo) were generously provided by Veronika Sprinkel; these include the shot of the Jim Reinders poster.

The monochrome shot of Stonehenge is from wikimedia, while the monochrome photo of Jim Reinders at age 21 is from carhenge.com.