1964 Alfa Romeo Giulia TZ: The Project | Petrolicious

The 105 Series Alfa Romeos, the Giulias, are widely loved. They are also widely raced. Giulia coupes and sedans are a common choice for enthusiasts looking for a vintage car to modify and take to the track, and back in the 1960s Alfa Romeo had a similar idea. They built a few racing-oriented versions of the 105 Series through their Autodelta competition division, but in 1963 the Tubolare Zagato was the most radical development by far. It featured a tube frame chassis, all aluminum coachwork by Zagato, and it was homologated a year later.

I always dreamed about owning an older ferrari or older maserati or an older alfa romeo something exotic and italian then i wanted a car that was beautiful a car that spoke to me in the same fashion as any of the coachbuilt italian cars and that to volare zagato kind of ticks all the boxes i really drilled down my search for one of those and frankly it’s tough

To find one i couldn’t come upon one that was done and ready to do the things i want to do with it so instead i bought a project i love all cars ever since i was 15 years old i got my first alfa i’m very interested in automobiles in general actually every part about a car to me is interesting but i particularly like the story he told me that this is a car that a

Lady racer raced and it had a local history here in california i’m conrad stephenson nieghbors for alpha males i’m david eisenbach and i drive an alfa romeo to balata as a gatto i learned about the art of italian coast building it intersects with this incredibly romantic period the golden age of the post-war sports car the 1950s through the mid-1960s when alfa

Romeo would sell you the same car that they would sell the team at seabury this particular car is really special in that it’s one of the greatest alphas that came along in the early 60s it was a special built racing effort that alpha came back to racing with its the two bellari zagato a tc one i actually did a nationwide search gotten to know a lot of restoration

Shops for italian cars and whenever i would talk about alfa romeo conrad’s name would come up he kept on being associated with alfa romeos i for some reason have always been into restoring automobiles i get a lot of satisfaction out of bringing something back that had a rough time and in restoring this car i’m so grateful for those fine original examples it feels

Good to me to bring back something like this that had gotten down the wrong path people i know and respect and continually went back to him as kind of the reference for alfa romeos of this type what was really spectacular is conrad seemed inspired by the project it kind of fit together and then i had met conrad just by spending time in monterey and car week and

Pebble beach i got along with him it was a really challenging project it was also raced in the united states so much of the innovation was done with a little bit of los angeles aircraft repairs and you know good quality parts but not at all correct with this car from the get-go david i shinbone the owner decided to show it in the state that it was which was a

Running race car and with all that evolution the car was sold in los angeles in 1964 to a guy named lou melon who had it race with dido and nick dioguardi who were two italian brothers who were kind of hot fused with a performance car shop in los angeles this car first came to california and raced at candlestick park they did not have remarkable success with

The car and they sold it in either late 1965 or early 1966 to al and nadine bringle alan nadine had a shop called mo tech and motek was an alfa romeo distributor in southern california this woman who was called i wouldn’t call her a housewife only but that’s what they often called her the san diego housewife she was very fast in the car i believe the husband

Wanted to drive it but she was a little quicker and the nadine the spouse in the shop was actually the hot shoe she was a lot faster than al she was often times faster than the men who would race in her classes final and best race car was the two volare zagato that he got from lou melon and this wasn’t her first alpha she’d erased other alphas little julieta’s

And julius i believe the tz was the car that took her through the 1966 scca season and she turned out to be at the southern pacific champion that season she accumulated enough points and enough races to be the champion of seed production so this car has had a rough life i don’t know that it was registered on the street i think it’s always raced and one of the

Things about doing a restoration on a car is the general rule is that you want to do the least you need to do to the car if you could have an original car with the old paint you wouldn’t touch it in the summer of 1966 the car was rear-ended it was packed back up and had a temporary fiberglass tail on it there’s incredible literature calling it the duct-tape

Special for awhile and she finished the season with that fiberglass tail restoring a car from the ground where i am so intimate with every single part on this car put it all together and have it today or to drive it down the street for me is absolutely exhilarating and it pays back because of nadine success in 1966 and her family’s engagement in the racing

And hobby which really was part of their family business there is a ton of photo documentation which really helped us with the restoration of the car and i was so fortunate that conrad stevenson was willing and able to kind of be the commander in chief of this project over the subsequent four years when i purchased the car and it’s turned out spectacularly so

The challenge for me has been to a little bit of unpeeling the car and digging back and trying to in a sense resurrect or reconstruct the car as it was to find the metric hardware to replace tubes that had maybe been replaced but to do the very least keeping that mantra of the least i can do and the most of this car we can preserve the better the car that i’ve

Been restoring is chassis number 16 16 of a hundred cars roughly someone said conrad i think you might be getting too emotional about this project and because i do i was so particular about how the shape might come off or what kind of clamp you use or what i really do care about these details to the point where i’ve had incidents with people and they say dude

You need to just calm down and i can’t and i won’t the tz because of its weight you hit a bump in a light car that weighs around 1,600 pounds it goes in the air so you need to be very attentive to drive the car i love it this is a car that will want to kill you but it’s so fun so it’s intense the the most touching moment and impactful moment to me to date was

When tom wrangled son of the racer or nadine wrangle what he came to pebble beach to see the car he brought with him all of the things that his mother had collected and his father had collected and he had kept from the cars historic 1966 season he brought the steering wheel that his mother hit with a helmet when he was in the collision he brought the newspaper

Clippings about his mother’s success he brought the model alfa romeo tz and his father had painted with the livery to see what it would look like on the car he brought all of this stuff and he gave it to me to keep with the car so he doesn’t have it anymore but you know what i don’t have it either the car has it you you

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1964 Alfa Romeo Giulia TZ: The Project | Petrolicious By Petrolicious