Forza Alfa Romeo: Top seven cars at the Arese museum

Forget Caravaggio, Michelangelo and da Vinci; next time you're in northern Italy give the stuffy museums and heaving galleries a miss and make the pilgrimage to Alfa Romeo's Arese heritage collection.

It's there you'll find a priceless collection of automotive art -- the cars that shaped the famous Italian car-maker's history and continue to inspire and influence its designers to this very day.

It might share its name with a trashy nightclub from your youth but, in the metal, the 1952 Disco Volante is life affirming in a way its namesake could never be, however cheap its exotic-sounding cocktails.

Nicknamed the 'Flying Saucer', it's difficult to over-egg how important the jaw-droppingly beautiful the Disco is to not only Alfa Romeo, but car design in general.

It was created by Alfa's race division, Auto Delta, to signal its return to top-flight motorsport, and to keep costs low the Disco Volante was supposed to be based on the humble 1900 sedan of the same period.

We say "supposed to be" because like the very best racing organisations, Alfa's race team ignored the rules and cheated. Hence, beneath its thin aluminium body panels is an intricate tubular lattice structure, instead of the sedan's solid overweight underpinnings.

Even the engine is completely bespoke, with the standard motor re-cast in aluminium to save weight.

Taking advantage of state-of-the-art (back then) wind-bending techniques, the Disco was one of the world's slipperiest cars, with a drag coefficient of just 0.25Cd.

Unfortunately, it was a terrible racer.

It might have been aerodynamic, but its futuristic shape meant the Alfa generated huge lift at speed — then there were its proportions.

In making it beautiful, its designer made the fundamental mistake of making the Disco Volante far too wide for the street racing it was designed for.

Now considered something of a glorious failure, the Disco Volante is still credited with being one of the world's most influential pieces of automotive design. Jaguar's E-Type, for example, borrows hugely from the 1950s Italian.

By the mid-1960s the Alfa Romeo had become the dominant force in touring car racing, so it's perhaps unsurprising it race division, Autodelta, yearned for a new challenge.

Management decided it could be time to re-enter endurance sports car racing - but there was just one problem. To race, you needed a road-going supercar for homologation purposes - so the 33 Stradale was born.

Just 18 road cars were ever built as part of the Top 33 race car program and each was designed by design maestro, Franco Scaglione.

Now considered to be one of the most beautiful cars of all time, the curvaceous 33 Stradale was a natural rival of Lamborghini's Miura, except it was technologically leagues ahead of the Lambo.

Featuring a pair of dihedral butterfly doors (that were pinched for the McLaren F1 road car design), the 33 was based around a novel, lightweight tubular chassis and powered by a mildly detuned 2.0-litre four-cam fuel-injected dry-sump V8.

This was practically unheard of at the time, and the 33 also came standard with a six-speed manual gearbox — necessary to keep its mid-engine 170kW V8 on the boil.

It could rev to 10,000rpm and haul the road-going race car to 100km/h in 5.5 seconds and on to a top speed of more than 265km/h.

With double-wishbone suspension all round, powerful disc brakes and a set of lightweight cast aluminium wheels, the 33 Stradale tipped the scales at just 700kg. That meant it drove as well as it looked.

Racer for the road is so clichéd but could not be further from the truth when describing the 33 Stradale.

Out of the blue, Alfa shocked the world with the 8C.

The red-blooded brand proved, even in its beleaguered state, it still had the power to recapture the magic of cars like the 33 Stradale,

More than a decade later, the 8C remains a timeless piece of design, one that still manages to captivate.

Of course, from a branding perspective, the fast Alfa coupe should never have been allowed to happen.

After all, Alfa's parent was (and still is) the Fiat Group (renamed FCA in 2014), the same car-making behemoth that owns both Maserati and Ferrari.

The 8C must have been an unnecessary distraction for the Modena-based operations, especially since the glamourous Alfa was far more desirable compared to the gawky Ferrari F430 of the same vintage.

Worse still, Alfa didn't skimp on the engineering. The 8C packs a powerful 330kW 4.2-litre V8 that's combined with an expensive rear trans-axle mounted gearbox. Even the chassis was a bespoke aluminium spaceframe.

Where the Italian car-maker did cut corners though is in developing the 8C's chassis. Hence, the 8C's typical cornering attitude involves plough understeer followed by wild snap oversteer.

It might not have been resolved to drive, but the breathtakingly beautiful 8C deserves to be considered a highpoint for the brand as it manages to instantly recapture some of the magic and glamour of some of the great Alfas of the past.

Even if you've never actually seen a Montreal before, there's something eerily familiar about the Alfa coupe.

That's because the Montreal, which was produced between '70-77, was designed by famous Italian design consultant Bertone and penned by none other than one of the founding fathers of the supercar, Marcello Gandini.

It explains why, if you look closely, you'll see plenty of hints of the Lamborghini Miura. In fact, it's best to look at the Montreal as nothing short of a baby supercar of the seventies.

That certainly explains why, lurking beneath its bonnet, is a development of the legendary V8 that was used by the 33 Stradale.

Bored out to 2.6 litres, the Montreal lump produced a healthy 147kW when revving all the way out to 7000rpm as it did it.

Of course, all the extra weight associated with the Alfa being a large four-seat coupe and not a racer for the road meant the Alfa couldn't quite dish up supercar levels of go, but a 0-100km/h sprint of around seven seconds was still more than respectable for the period.

Sadly, over the years the Montreal's legacy has been tarnished. They are notoriously unreliable and fragile cars to own. The V8's early fuel-injection system, for example, has a nasty habit of going on strike at a moment's notice.

Greatest GP car of all time is a huge accolade but one well-deserved for the legendary P3 Tipo B that managed to help Alfa Romeo win the Formula 1 world championship in four consecutive seasons (1932-1935) -- a feat never since repeated.

The famous GP car, designed by F1 designer Vittorio Jano (the Gordon Murray or Adrian Newey of his day), came about from a rule change that saw F1 cars switch from two seats to just one.

Until the P3, F1 cars featured an on-board mechanic for all routine maintenance and the numerous tyre changes a typical F1 race would require, but after a spate of deaths from crashes, the idea of mobile mechanic was banished.

Jano set about taking advantage of the changes by designing a GP car with tight, compact dimensions to help slash weight.

Not that the P3 Tipo B is a small car. The stretched nose conceals a twin-supercharged straight-eight that pumped out a towering (back then) 160kW and split its drive to the two rear wheels through a four-speed manual.

Jano's pioneering approach to race car design was instantly rewarded with works Alfa driver, Tazio Nuvaleri, winning its first race.

Alfa's pint-sized TZ had a huge weight of expectation on its shoulders when it first appeared back in 1963.

That's because the Italian car-maker used the Zagato-designed coupe to underpin its triumphant return to motorsport after a long hiatus.

Borrowing much from the Giulia sedan, Alfa's TZ looks as if it was conceived in the wind tunnel.

The slippery aero was a necessity as engineers needed to overcome the TZ's lack of power (just 100kW from its petite 1570cc four-cylinder) with its teardrop-shaped low-drag body.

Its phenomenal on-track performance can also be attributed to its featherweight kerb weight (660kg).

Despite coming to terms with the switch from open-wheel racing to touring cars, the TZ saw Alfa Romeo return to its winning ways, taking class victories at Le Mans and Sebring.

Just 117 were made.

Towards the end of the 1960s Alfa began to tire of selling beautiful coupes and sedans and decided to shift its resources into developing a small car to help it challenge the likes of Ford and Volkswagen for volume.

The result was the Alfasud. Alfa managed to persuade talented ex-Porsche engineer Rudolf Hruska to oversee the 'Sud's development.

The Austrian developed the small Italian Ford Escort rival on budget and in record time.

Unsurprisingly, considering his background at Porsche (as well as VW), he chose a flat four-cylinder engine that gave a low centre of gravity, while front-wheel drive ensured excellent packaging.

The excellent engineering extended to a light but stiff body, in-board brake discs and innovative rear suspension, and the Alfasud from day one out-drove all the opposition.

Unfortunately, Hruska's fine work was completely undone by the way the little Alfa was assembled.

Without any cash of its own, Alfa persuaded the Italian government to finance the Alfasud's development. The politicians agreed, but on one condition - a new factory would be built in Naples.

It was catastrophic disaster for everyone involved.

Some 500km south of its Milanese HQ, Alfa Romeo management struggled to train the 15,000 unskilled workers needed to build is new baby.

When they were striking, the Alfasuds rolling off the line suffered horrific quality problems. Then, just when Alfa thought it couldn't get worse, poor quality steel slipped into the supply chain.

Owners reported widespread corrosion of their cars setting in within just a matter of months and what should have been its finest hour ended up damaging Alfa Romeo's reputation for decades.

Related Forza Alfa Romeo reading:
Forza Alfa Romeo: Design leads the charge
Forza Alfa Romeo: Stelvio Adventure Drive
Forza Alfa Romeo: Spotlight on Museo Storico
Forza Alfa Romeo: Alfa Romeo’s factory of the future
Forza Alfa Romeo: Tour of top-secret Skunkworks
Forza Alfa Romeo: Top seven cars at the Arese museum
Alfa Romeo Giulia 1963 Retro Review
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