Posts Tagged ‘spider’

Best Documented – 1981 Alfa Romeo Spider Veloce

April 5, 2010

Update: Price is now up to $1900 – he must be getting more calls than expected. Even at this new price, the car is a pretty decent deal.

Here at RustyButTrusty, I try to totally favor Italian cars show an even selection of cars. That said, I realized I hadn’t featured an Alfa Romeo in a while.. and it’s easy to find plenty of expensive Alfas, project Alfas, and listings with a phone number and not much else, there is the occasional thorough, well-written listing for a reasonably priced driver that has plenty of summers’ worth of fun in it, and can legitimately qualify as a classic (later spiders and 164s don’t really fall into that category just yet, although they’re getting close).

This is a pretty rare example of a well-written ad for a very reasonably-priced car. The seller has thoroughly photographed the car with a good selection of decent-sized pictures, and a clear description of the car’s good & bad points, as well as recent work. You can find it in Springfield, PA (near Philadelphia) for just $1300… incidentally, the same price I paid for my spider in 1991, and it was not nearly as nice.

1981 Alfa Romeo Spider Veloce left

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You say Zegato, I say Zogata – 1981 Lancia Beta Zagato 2000

March 12, 2010

Maybe some of you have followed my experiences with my Lancia Beta sedan… as with many older cars, it’s sat for some time and, as a consequence, had (and has) various needs. So you might ask (and I wouldn’t be offended!), why on earth would you be looking at Lancia Betas? Did you not learn your lesson? Well, yes and no. I learned that the carburetted cars are more trouble-prone if not maintained, and that the fuel-injected cars suffered less from application of smog equipment. I also learned that EFI as installed on these cars makes for smoother running and easier cold-starting, and that the last of the Betas imported to the US came with a better-looking, tidier grill (which might show this car to actually be a 1982 model).

All that said, my sedan is actually fun, in an oddball kind of way. It also has a comfortable ride and a nice interior… it’s kind of like an Italian interpretation of a Mercedes or a Volvo. And for a car of its size, weight, and ride, it corners, brakes, and handles really well. So that brings us to today’s car…. a 1981 Beta Zagato with a 2-liter fuel-injected engine. Same ride, same handling, same brakes, more power. And the top goes down. What’s not to like? For the low, low price of $1000 (probably less if you show up with a neat stack of $100s), you can find this Beta in Roseville, CA, near Sacramento.

1981 Lancia Beta Zagato front

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Sports & Exotic Inspiration Wrap Up – Spitfire, Spider, and B

January 27, 2010

As you might have noticed, I’ve been featuring cars discussed in a recent article in Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car, or at least near relatives thereof. The first two were a Mazda RX-7 and a Porsche 924S (they featured the 944), which left me with the following cars. Given the self-imposed limit of $3000, the search for an affordable example of each was not such a resounding success, especially when compared with the first two. Since these cars were available starting in the sixties, I added an additional constraint of being pre-1975 to make smogging easier for those of us who need to. Since each of these cars has been featured in the past, I’m not going to give each its own article. With that said, let’s get into it:

First up is a 1970 Triumph Spitfire. As a popular older car, parts are not that hard to find or that expensive. Further, it’s not hard to find a mechanically decent example that could use some cosmetic help in the future, while serving as a driver. This car, in Medical Lake, WA (near Spokane), is such a car. The owner invested a lot in the mechanicals, and the car now needs attention to a rough idle (attributed to the cam), along with paint and interior work. Since the work was done a while ago, count on doing some shake-down and then moving on to the looks department.

1970 Triumph Spitfire

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