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Overrated: Alfa Romeo SZ
2 years ago
The SZ was designed at Fiat's Centro Stile, then assembled by Zagato
From some angles – ideally dead on from either end – the SZ had a mighty presence, like someone who’s walked into a room wearing nothing but a smile. Its nose also had more than a touch of Hannibal Lecter about it. Seen in the rear view mirror it could scare you half to death. Those thin strips of triple hexa-shaped headlights on either side of the ‘Trefoil’ grille were meant to look intimidating and they were, deeply so, especially when viewed beside, say, the front end of a Mk4 Ford Escort.
Yet in profile the SZ’s then-vast 16-inch wheels always looked too small within their individual arches to my eyes, especially those at the rear, while the doors appeared too deep relative to the roofline. The car’s reptilian features looked more like something that had been designed by A R Geiger – to take centre stage in a horror science fiction film – so it felt like the product of deeply creative but, perhaps, troubled minds. Perhaps that’s merely how the designers at Centro Stile were feeling at the time. Life within the Italian car industry was none too rosy back then so maybe there was some subliminal paranoia to its styling. Or maybe I simply didn’t get it.
Either way, my main issue with the SZ was not so much the way it looked but the way it drove. Or to be more accurate, the way some folks suggested it drove.
"The main issue was that it didn’t go anywhere near as hard as it looked like it should – its 2959cc V6 produced only 207bhp at 6200rpm – while around corners and under braking it was well and truly thumped by cars like the BMW M3 and Mercedes 190E 2.3 Cosworth"
Believe what was written about it in the press at the time and you might easily have presumed Alfa had reinvented the sports car with the SZ. It had steering that was so detailed in its messaging, some reckoned, they could run over a rabbit and tell what it’d had for breakfast. The SZ’s 3-litre ‘Busso’ V6 engine also produced sounds that could reduce Pavarotti to tears, by all accounts, while the thrust on offer wasn’t just sufficient to unlock a rear-wheel drive chassis that had been touched by God himself: this was an Alfa that was every bit as good to drive as it was to behold, or so they proclaimed.
The reality, I believe, was somewhat different. Although the SZ’s composite body panels clothed a backbone chassis that was derived not from the road-going 75 but from Alfa’s Group A Touring Car racers of the day, it was a curiously disappointing car to drive on most roads – for a variety of reasons, many of which got lost on the tidal wave of enthusiasm that swept most other opinions on it clean away.
The main issue was that it didn’t go anywhere near as hard as it looked like it should in a straight line – its 2959cc V6 produced only 207bhp at 6200rpm alongside a mere 181lb ft – while around corners and under braking it was well and truly thumped by cars like the BMW E30 M3 Evo, Mercedes 190E 2.3 Cosworth and Ford Sierra Cosworth. Yet at £35,000 (in the UK in 1989) it cost more than any of them.
“You had to lasso the gearlever to persuade it to shift from one ratio to the next while the clutch was as predictable in its bite as a lazy alligator; sometimes it didn’t do much, sometimes it bit, and most of the time you had little idea which it would be”
The gearchange was also heroically awful. You had to lasso the gearlever to persuade it to shift from one ratio to the next while the clutch was as predictable in its bite as a lazy alligator; sometimes it didn’t do much, sometimes it bit, and most of the time you had little idea which it would be. Trying to drive an SZ quickly but smoothly was, therefore, a bit like trying to pour a saucepan of hot soup back into the tin; a hopeless cause, with little overall reward at the end anyway.
The gear ratios themselves were also inexplicably long, meaning the mid-range torque was even less potent than it seemed on paper, although at least this meant you could stick it in third and leave it there for most of the time. Anything to avoid the wrestling match that was changing gear in it.
The SZ was curiously underpowered, although it did sound nice
As for the chassis itself, there was some genius within its bones, no question. Although the ride was nothing special and the tail felt oddly cumbersome during a direction change, the SZ’s steering was far more incisive than a 75’s while its body control was much tidier if you were patient with the throttle on the way out of corners. It still understeered, but not tragically so like the 75, and the subsequent lurch into oversteer that so distinguished the saloon car if you even thought about lifting in the middle of a corner was pretty much eradicated, replaced by a rear axle that behaved quite well most of the time, despite carrying the weight of the gearbox.
But in the end, there was only so far a mad looking composite bodyshell and a by-then quite distant competition heritage could get the SZ before its case began to fall apart. And once it did there was precious little room for manoeuvre. Sonorous V6 and sharp body control aside, this was a car that could, and should, have been so much better than it turned out to be.
Why couldn’t Alfa have given it the performance it needed to at least live with its rivals from Germany in a straight line? Why couldn’t they have made the gearchange better – or just less dreadful – the clutch sharper, the ride smoother? Why couldn’t they have made it just a little bit more like the Italian M3 it was so desperately crying out to be?
I remember climbing out of the very first one I drove, wondering what on earth all the fuss was about. The week before I’d driven an E30 M3 and a brand new Sapphire Cosworth for a twin test and I could not believe how underwhelmed by it I was – especially given how highly rated it had been by those who’d driven and written about it a few weeks earlier for a magazine in the same publishing house. One of its keenest fans was someone whose opinion I’d taken as gospel up until then, and I know for a fact he still thinks I’m entirely wrong about the SZ to this day.
But then sometimes you need to agree to disagree and move on, I suppose. Just to be clear, though, the SZ remains one of the most overrated cars I’ve ever driven, period, and not just because I expected way too much from it in the first place.
