Alfasuds and all that

[JHertzman@xxxxxxx]

In AD7-232 Carl Prochilo did we outlanders the favor of translating the
unsigned posting in the Mother Tongue which appeared in AD7-224 from
"IRAGIUELE".
>>> PER QUANTO RIQUARDA L`ALFA SUD  E L`ALFA ROMEO A PROPOSITO DELLE DUE
AZZIENDE AVETE DIMENTICATO CHE A QUEL PUNTO NON ERA PIU` ALFA ROMEO .....
 MA BEN SI L`ALFA ROMEO ERA DI PROPIETA DEL GRUPPO I.R.I. CHE SI COME E` DI
PROPIETA DELLO STATO  NON PUO` AVERE IL  LOGO  MILANO  SULLO STEMMA  IN QUANTO
RAPPRESENTA L`ITALIA<<<

>>>As far as the Alfa Sud and Alfa Romeo factories are concerned, you have
forgotten that at that time, the company Alfa Romeo had ceased to exist (as a
privately owned firm).  The company had been taken over by the I.R.I. group.
Since Alfa Romeo was now a state controlled business, the wording Milano was
no longer applicable as Alfa Romeo now represented Italy.<<<

There is a nitpicking discrepancy of chronology here; the word "Milano" was
dropped from the badge in 1972, which Fusi says was "con l'entrata in
produzione del nuovo modello "Alfasud" presso il nuovo complesso industriale
appositamente creato a Pomigliano d'Arco (Napoli)" - "with the start of the
production of the new "Alfasud" - -" 

The I.R.I had taken over Alfa Romeo in 1933. The effective transition from
private management to Government management had been earlier, in November
1926, with the foundation of the Liquidations Institute (I.L.) while the
beginning of the government takeover is dated to April 1922, following the
collapse in 1921 of the financial institution (The B.N.S.) to which la Romeo
was a principal debtor. So there is a gap of about fifty years between the
cessation of existence as a privately owned firm, which IRAGIUELE referred to,
and the dropping of the city name from the company badge.

The relationships between the government, Alfa Romeo, Alfasud, and various
social forces (labor, for instance, and regional hostilities, and competitors)
can generously be described as Byzantine in complexity; it is hard for an
outsider (for me, anyhow) to tell who is calling the shots at any particular
time. (I will welcome correction and/or kibitzing on any point at any time-) 

There was in the fifties at Alfa Romeo a bunch of people who were fairly pure
Car Guys but who perhaps did not know as much as they might about running
manufacturing operations effectively. And there was, above Alfa Romeo, an
economist who began as a management specialist in the textile industry, from
there became the top man at Pirelli, and eventually became manager of the
Piedmontese Hydroelectric Corporation and then of an I.R.I. subsidiary,
Finmeccanica, which controlled several corporations including Alfa Romeo. This
person's personal secretary was engaged to a Porsche protege who had been
heavily involved in the organization, from scratch, of Volkswagen. This was
Rodolfo Hruska, who was appointed as a technical consultant to straighten out
the production problems of the 1900 and the Giulietta that the Car Guys had
developed. From here on it starts to get complicated.

Alfasud, heavily influenced by the government's wish to bring prosperity
south, was Hruska's product, not so much as an engineered and designed car but
as an industrial complex which happened to be in the car business. The design
work involved Hruska, Chiti, Chirico, Giugiaro for the styling, another
Porsche engineer named Heinrich Hoffmann for the chassis, and a bunch of Ford-
trained Simca executives from France to run the show. It was a big show, by
Italian standards; the 1900 had been Alfa Romeo's first real production car-
21,152 cars in seven years- followed by the Giulietta with 174,613 cars, a
huge step up in volume, but over a million Alfasuds before the car grew into
the 33 with over a million and a quarter built.

The only places where I have seen the Milan company referred to in print as
"Alfanord" (one word) were in Grifith Borgeson's chapter on The Modern Era,
which starts with, and is very sympathetic to, Rodolfo Hruska. Fusi, at the
end of his biographical entry on Hruska, does refer to Alfa Nord (two words)
in describing Hruska's later position as "Sovraintendente Progettazione e
Sperimentazione di tutti i prodotti Alfa Nord, Alfa Sud, Autodelta,
Pomigliano, Spica" - "Designs and Experiments Superintendent of the all Alfa
Nord, Alfa Sud, Autodelta, Pomigliano and Spica products." I think you will
find that the idea of the Alfasud tail wagging an Alfanord dog will not sit
very well with people who think of the company as Alfa Romeo of Milan, the
heritage of Nicola Romeo and Giuseppe Merosi and Vittorio Jano, not a one of
them born and bred in Stuttgart. In a discussion with one of the Alfa Romeo
loyalists I suggested that one might in shorthand refer to the Jano and Satta
cars through the 105/115s as Alfa Romeos, the Alfasuds as Alfasuds, the
transaxle cars as Alfanords and the post-'86 cars as Alfiats, and he said that
was about right.

I'll leave it at that. Read on elsewhere, if so inclined, and sort out your
own interpretations.

John H. 

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