Type 116

"My" Giulietta - 3rd series, 2.0 litres, A.D. 1984  - I still miss you, Giulié.

First of all, beware - this could be boring.

I am going to talk about cars. European cars, really.

You may run for your life,, now.  Faster, faster, faaaster!!!!!

You still there? OK, thanks God the world is full of masochists, though not nearly enough of them are women (and even less of them are beautiful women, simple for statistics reasons).

Though I have been spared the worst of the illness, I am a bit of a petrol-head.

I am not to the point where it affects my professional or financial decisions, I rarely if ever speed on the road, and my life does not operate around cars.

Which could be,in reality, a manifestation of some other, more obscure illness... I should discuss it with my therapist.

But, when I climb an old car, chances are that I know a bit of its history - modern cars are another matter; between stricter regulation and consumer demands, technically they are almost all identical: fwd with trans-axle gearboxes, unequal length drive shafts, for-life metal distribution chains are replacing rubber belts in into most modern designs, as tighter packaging has made more and more difficult to change the damn thing etc...

Admittedly, I am a technical-detail oriented maniac, but I never cared how a car then actually drives.

Or how fast it is.

As long as it is not an Alfa Romeo RWD saloon.

In which case, I must drive it! I must! I must! Gimme that damn keys!!!

Wrouumm!!! Wroumm! Wroum! 

(TA-Da_Da_Dam! - dramatic music clue)

Yes, I am a bit of an Alfa maniac, of the "old guard" - I like the old Giulietta, Giulia, Alfetta, Giulietta '77, 90, 75 (known as Milano, in the U.S.A ), SZ, RZ and, now, the new Giulia.

I never really dug the FWD Alfa Romeos (shit made in Pomigliano d'Arco; no wonder that they fall apart looking at them!)

I haven't always been a fan of the marque... when I was a kid, I was all for foreign cars - German, French, Japanese, anything but Italian cars.

My father's first car was a FIAT 1100d - thirty years after, he still loathed the God-awfully thirsty piece of  whatever.

(To be honest, I suspect that its 8 mpg mileage was more the product of some half-assed modification by a local mechanic, than a by-product of FIAT lack of ingenuity and unreliable quality control)

And he managed to pass the prejudice to his sons.

So, when I finally got my licence, I wanted to buy a ten years old Subaru Leone Wagon 4x4... it was a sensible car, in my mind.

Wagon, so I could use it to shuttle things to and from work (I worked as a mason - with my father, that didn't give me a wage), 4x4 so could go anywhere, and not really too fast (the 1.8 litres carburetted engine had some 70 bhp).

Not really the dream of a petrol-head...

But, as I said, I wasn't really paid, for my job. All the money I earned went to pay for the restoration of our home (yes, the most idiotic thing a 20 something can do... invest what few money he earns in a house in a shitty corner of a shitty country where he doesn't feel at home, even though he was born there... JUST so his parents can't accuse him of having run away, like his bigger brother), so I couldn't really take a thousand dollars (two weeks worth of my work, really) just to buy a car, because I didn't have any money at all.

It bothered me to death asking my father his car, because he loved that piece of junk beyond logic (a 1983 Mercedes W124, 200D - 60 hp gross power, then one had to subtract the power for the alternator, water pump, servo-direction pump and an actual exhaust system, multiply what is left for the efficiency of the average late '70s transmission, 75%,  consider its 1.5 tonnes dry weight and it was no wonder that the engine couldn't broke the wall of the 0-60 mph in 30 seconds, or that the car could barely pass 120 km/h on a level road).

I'd rather have a car for myself,  but my parents kept answering that it was not the case, as I still had to serve my national service.

Their official reasoning was that, if I was going away for a year, the car would have rotten away... a 1k car, when I was making around 2k a month, working for them with no insurance or papers, because dad "didn't like bureaucracy".

The unofficial reason (one of the most bitter things that I learnt in my life was that I could not believe my parents, because they spent half their time telling themselves lullabies and couldn't see reality even when it bit their arses) was that they feared me having some sort of freedom beyond their control, leading to the same kind of outcome of my brother - going away to live with a woman, leaving them to themselves; before you start objecting, remember: most Italian families work along those lines.

I know, I know... there is something fishy, there.

Anyway, I finally got drafted, we were in the middle of the fucking house restoration, and my quarters were 30 km away from my home-town.

I was on guard duties, and had a day home every 3... to work on the house.    

Clue me coming home, spending a day working on the house, and then having to come back to quarters by 7.30 in the morning.

After the second time, the first car below 1200$ in the second-hand magazine was suddenly mine.

It was a 11 years old, 100k miles, Alfa Romeo "Nuova Giulietta" 2 litres, last series and last production year (actually, the platform was already that of the future AlfA 90, I discovered a couple of weeks ago), with a rebuilt engine (the owner tried to make the 1000 km from Switzerland to Calabria at 200 km/h; the car was rated only for  a max speed of 185km7h - oops! ).

It was the "second daughter" of the Alfa Romeo type 116 chassis (considering the fact that that last production run used the revised version, soon to  underpin the 75, more a 4th daughter, really).

So, the 70hp 4x4 wagon of my desires was replaced by a way lighter, way faster 130 hp RWD with almost no trunk... uh, Dad, were you sure that you loved me? It doesn't really seem a rational decision.

Gear lever apart*, it drove well..

(* As anyone who drove one of the "Type166"s can tell you, their stick is not really precise... not a fault of the gearbox, which is really improved over the highly regarded unit used in the precedent Giulia, but rather of the way the gear lever was connected to the gearbox, through one single rotating and sliding pole instead then, say, the two Bowden cables used by the FWD VW of the same age, or the two rigid levers used in the fiat Uno...being the intermediate movements too shorts, any amount of slack induced by wear had oversized effects), 

Really well.

No, really, really, really well, once you got used a bit to its two or three idiosyncrasies (namely, some voids in acceleration with a coldish engine under 2000rpm, a overly precise non-servo steering and a 0.1 seconds delay between pushing the brakes and the brakes acting... this, probably because of oil too old), it drove way better than that shit of the BMW 3 Series of my friend Pat (one buys a BMW, and goes for the 1.6 litres????? Madness!).

Maybe I was lucky, but in the 4 years that I had it, the clunker really broke down only once, and I fixed it in half an hour (the cable grounding the engine... detached one side, opened the connector, placed the remaining head inside the connector, close it with a hammer, mounted it back ).

I changed oil and filters, the head of the distributor (when I bought it, it had problems starting in damp weather) and re-chambered the last box of the exhaust, but It never stopped.


It had a chain, so it couldn't broke the distribution belt either (my bro totalled three cars, that way), and few to no electronic, so it didn't kill batteries like the Mercedes, as for a long while I drove only once a week.

Year on year, km on km, it didn't suffer more mishaps than the Mercedes W124 that inherited when my father died.

It was just the funniest car that I ever driven (ahem, second is the UAZ 469B, with a VM turbodiesel - it made the Alfa look like a safe car)

To be honest, I still miss the Giulietta, sometimes... and it's been almost twenty years.

The car that made a petrol-head out of me...