Your correspondent has been gearing up for a long drive in the Alfetta, and part of that effort has been to attend to the disintegrating seats. Suffering from many years of sun and heat, they were actually remarkably intact, particularly (oddly enough) the driver’s seat. However, the passenger seat covering was falling apart, and the back seat seams were splitting every time something was set on them. Have a look at our worst offender:
Just to prove the cars all work, occasionally they actually get to do more than just run out to the shop for maintenance and smog-related work (don’t ask me what I’m currently doing to get the Beta through smog). The message came through late last week that the weather was good enough for the inaugural run of the Bernal GT100, and since the spider hasn’t been out in a while, we picked it to be the car for the day. So you might ask, why are there no pictures of the spider? Well, at 8:45am on an empty stomach, the battery (despite being disconnected) decided to fail after a bit of cranking the car over on the starter. So the Alfetta got the opportunity to step in, which was just as well since it ended up being rather cold & foggy on the early part of the run. And of course, being the scruffiest looking car I own, it fired up on the first try!
Luckily I’d had the foresight to fill it up last week, and since I hadn’t cleaned up the fuses or grounds, which has been causing some brown-outs with headlights, radio, and radar detector on, I cracked open the windows and listened to Alfa music instead. After grabbing some breakfast at our favorite coffee shop near Kim’s old place, we headed up to the Diamond Heights Safeway for the meet-up. Yup, the Bernal GT 100 started in Diamond Heights – I’m guessing because of the convenience of parking, coffee, and pastries all in one place.
Having just got back into my Alfetta, and realizing what a great car it is to drive, I thought I’d look up a couple more of these. For the money, as long as you’re patient have deep pockets to get you through smog, these can be a lot of fun. Aside from the SPICA pump oil filter, which has been craftily hidden behind the oil pump, they’re fairly easy and straightforward to work on. While they don’t have the extensive US competition history the 105/115 GTVs have, they’re still attractive cars with a design that is clearly related to the Scirocco and Esprit. Changing to smaller European stainless bumpers also does a lot to clean up the look – I highly recommend this for anyone with a US-market Alfetta.
Anyway, enough waxing on about these cars – here’s our first example, a 1979 Sprint Veloce that can be found on craigslist in Bellevue, WA for $2500. This car might be a Velocissima edition Alfetta, which got the Ronal A1 wheels you see here, along with some other aerodynamic bits and pieces that would be hard to see on a black car. Seller seems to have read the manual on how to photograph cars for sale, since he’s included 2 outside pics from different angles (one from the rear would have been better), an interior shot, and an engine shot. He also claims extensive service history, including an engine service for $4K, and some performance modifications. Detail-oriented eyes will notice some rusty-looking areas on the passenger-side inner wheel well, but I believe those are just smog stickers. Get rid of the Ferrari logo on the wheel, fix the key marks in the paint, and you should be good to go!
Rusty But Trusty 