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."