Re: Alfas and mods

["David B. Serafini" <dbs@domain.elided>]

> Date: Thu, 01 Apr 1999 09:45:28 -0500
> From: "Scott Johnson" <scott@domain.elided>
>
> Modifying a street alfa is something of a Holy War around here. Many of
> the old timers and purists (myself included) believe that it was in
> Alfa's nature to provide you with maximum performance within the
> compromises of a street car. This is not a Chevy Lumina... most of the
> "easy" hotrodding (exhaust, intake, suspension) was done at the factory,
> and tinkering with that will just screw it up.
>
> That leaves you with the serious stuff... 
> [...]
> and all of it will compromise its streetability.
> [...]
> My opinions only!
>
> Scott Johnson
> Alfa Spider FAQ Author

Scott, I agree with you with one exception.  The "compromises of a street car"
really says that Alfa chooses a particular point in the design space of engine,
exhaust, suspension, tires, etc to meet their idea of the right weighting of
acceleration, speed, handling, reliability, etc.  Because Alfa makes cars for
many drivers, they have to average over what they think different drivers like.
An individual driver may prefer a different weighting that is fairly far from
the average.  A driver may be able to change an Alfa to make it suit his/her
preference better.  This will probably result in improving some things at the
expense of others things, but the other things may not matter to that driver.

Example: modifying the engine to produce more power or torque will likely
improve the acceleration and maybe the top speed, but it will probably harm the
handling some: the car probably won't handle as well during harder-than-stock
acceleration or faster-than-stock speed (since it's not designed for it).  But
if the driver only wants more power so he can blow off souped-up Hondas at stop
lights driving in a straight line and never uses the extra acceleration in
turns (assuming the engine doesn't change mass), then _for_that_driver_ there
could be no discernable degradation in handling.

So I agree that, in general, there are no tweaks to an Alfa that produce
improvements in some aspect of performance without a corresponding degradation 
in some other aspect, but there may be specific cases where the degradation
doesnt matter to a particular driver.

Even in racing, this holds, I think.  For example, on a GTV6, replacing the hood and
back hatch with fibreglass makes the car appreciably lighter, improving
acceleration.  They wouldn't hold up well on a daily driver, but on a
race car reliability is less of an issue.  Of course, you'll have to adjust
springs and shocks to keep the handling from changing because of the lower 
weight on the springs and lower roll inertia, but I can't see any reason
why that couldn't be done.  

I don't claim it's simple, but I think there can be cases where it can be
arguably a good thing.

- -david
'86 GTV6

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End of alfa-digest V7 #607
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