The Carchive: '81 Alfa Romeo Giulietta

20140324_140906

Welcome to another opportunity to join me in rifling through the huge piles of ancient paper that even the recycling people wouldn’t take on. It’s The Carchive.

Recently this EXCLUSIVE TO HOONIVERSE!!!1! Category has, well, been kinda modern. It’s therefore high time we stepped up the elderliness a tad. Let’s have a look at an early eighties Italian.

20140324_140925

This is a 1981 brochure for the Giulietta, which had orignially been marketed as the Nuova Giulietta, presumably to distance itself from the Vecchio Giulietta of the ’50’s. Also, I have to be honest here; I make a big thing about stuff from The Carchive being untouched for generations and only nowhaving the dust blown off for the good of the Hooniverse; but this is actually a rather well-thumbed document which I have read from cover to cover many times. There’s something about it; it’s involving to read.

I mean, check out this next paragraph:

“The Giulietta offers the driver and passengers greater traveling comfort. This is no luxury, although space, equipment, ventilation and quietness are the attributes of a high class machine. It is a careful choice, dictated by reason which calls for the ideal conditions of tranquility, practicality and safety to make the journey pleasant and not a forced and dangerous march.”

Wowsers. Though, I have to say a forced and dangerous march sounds like a good laugh.

The Guilietta sat in the range North of the AlfaSud and south of the Alfetta; meaning rear-wheel drive like the Alfetta and the GTV, but without the six cylinder engines. The oily bits then transmogrified into the 75 / Milano, which would prove to be the final rear-wheel-drive “regular” Alfa to be offered.

20140324_140955

“The driving position of the Giulietta makes the driver the complete master of his car”

They were kind of right, inasmuch as the driver, who sat in either the left or the right hand front seat, depending on the market, sat in a better place for actually controlling the car than most of the passengers did. If you inspected the driving position itself you’d find that it didn’t differ wildly from what had become the Italian norm of the era, with long armed, short legged folk slotting in with greatest ease. Ergonomics were indifferent, but the dashboard itself, with contra-rotating dials, was pretty rad.

But the joy of the Guilietta was what made it go.

20140324_141026

“The new Giulietta has its clutch-gearbox differential unit at the rear to increase the adhesion of the rear driving wheels”

Splitting the transmission from the engine and sending it aft gave the Guilietta genuine 50/50 weight distribution. Ally this to rear wheel drive and you could begin to see where the main appeal of the car could be found.

Reading on through the specification list you find such race-bred technologies as De Dion rear suspension and inboard rear brake discs. In fact, in a few places our intrepid copy-writer seems to get slightly carried away:

“….Air intake ducts optimise cylinder charging by exploiting to a maximum the resonance phenomena which occur in the ducts”

How to make ducts sound interesting. And if you like air filters; well…

“the air-filter, with its thermostatic valve, aids cold starting and provides a constant stoichiometric air-petrol ratio”

What was the last car brochure you ever encountered where they spoke of Stoichometry?

20140324_141006

This is clearly a brochure for a very keen devotee of the driver’s car and all its technical minutiae. The car buyer who merely needs a car is amply served by the many photos and line drawings, while the enthusiast has his or her appetite well and truly whetted with all that technical jargon.

It seems a shame that the Alfa Romeo brochure of today is rather more geared towards lifestyle and image than the nuts-and-bolts of what makes the car truly special; but we keep being told encouraging things about the good old days being ready to make a comeback.

The waiting is agony.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

The maximum upload file size: 64 MB. You can upload: image, audio, video. Links to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other services inserted in the comment text will be automatically embedded. Drop files here