Man Maths: Alfa Romeo SZ

Anyway, one came up for sale, low miles and at a price I could just about afford. At the last minute I thought I’d best ring a mate who sold lots of old Alfas but, curiously, no SZs. Did he know the car? He did. Apparently it had been parked under a car port for years, exposed to the elements and while the body didn’t rust and looked great because it contained no metal (of which more in a minute), underneath it was as rotten as Dick Dastardly.

‘That car is the reason I don’t sell SZs,’ he told me with commendable directness.

Even so, I still like to think that owning an SZ would not only enrich my day every time I fired it up, but enrich my life just having it. People would want to talk to me about it, how I was getting on with it, what it had done. They’d all be terribly envious.

But then they probably wouldn’t know all those other things I already knew when I started looking for one. Such as the fact that, despite its apparently short and stubby body, it sits on the same wheelbase as the Alfa 75 from which it is derived, or that the platform dates back to the 1972 Alfetta and retains its non-independent De Dion rear suspension. I wonder also if they’d know that despite the fact the car is clothed in panels made from an obscure composite material called MODAR, and has only two seats, it somehow contrived to be heavier than its most closely related stablemate, the steel bodied, 2+2 GTV6. Hard to believe? Try lifting the bonnet and you’ll struggle no more.

Then there is the inconvenient truth that despite having ‘Z’ badges on its flanks and its name standing for ‘Sport Zagato’, it was not in fact designed by the famed Italian coachbuilder, but in-house at Alfa Romeo. All Zagato did was build the thing, and if you look at the panel gaps that resulted you may find yourself wondering just how good an idea that turned out to be.

Finally, consider how quickly your ownership experience would turn south if you had an unplanned excursion or even just a minor bump. Even if the car were not impossible to repair, it would be ruinously expensive.

And yet, when I found myself at Max Girardo’s place earlier in the week and saw his SZ parked there, I was entirely ready to forget all those inconvenient facts, plus a few more, like I can’t afford the £60,000 it costs to to buy a half decent one, have nowhere to put it and wouldn’t really know what to do with it if I did. My love for this car is blind, which is probably also why I think it’s beautiful. I don’t care about all the problems. I just want one, and as much now as I did when I first drove one a third of a century ago. Which, of course, is what Man Maths is all about. Or at least should be.

Lead image courtesy of Girardo & Co.

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