Re: Alfa factories outside Italy - Strange Suds

["David R Johnson" <johnsnd@domain.elided>]

On Apr 26, 10:51am, Graham Hilder wrote:

> Tony and Keith and Zamani (and John) all indicated that various Alfas were =
> assembled in Malaysia, including some Alfa Sud. The Sud issue is most =
> interesting, as I once saw a road test from a Malaysian magazine of a =
> strange Sud, a 1500cc hybrid which I think had the 2-door body of a TI but =
> the square-headlamps and single-carb of a sedan. Since then, I've actually =
> seen a 2 or 3 of these weird and rare animals in New Zealand.  I haven't =
> found any reference to them as an official Alfa product in any of the Alfa =
> books I've got...... does anyone know the story behind these cars at all? =
> Were they some local Malaysian-only variation (presumably Italy-sanctioned =
> however, as Zamani says that Malaysian Alfas were either CKD or CBU).

I'm not sure this is such a strange Sud.  My second Alfa, a 1983 model owned
when I lived in England, was labelled I believe as a 1.5 SC.  It was as you
describe, with a 2-door coupe body, square headlights (as opposed to the 4
round headlight versions), and with a single carb version of the 1.5 engine.  I
always liked the 2-door styling, and preferred the square headlights to the
round ones.

The carb was a twin-choke downdraught Weber sitting on an odd cast aluminum
manifold.  The boxer engine layout resulted in very long runners from the
centrally located carb to each cylinder bank, presumably increasing the torque
and reducing top-end power versus the Ti, which had two twin Webers mounted
directly to the intake ports with essentially no manifold.  (The boxer motors
also had the advantage of requiring no exhaust manifold, and utilized a 4-2-1
design directly bolted to the exhaust posts, and giving the Suds their
characteristic exhaust sound, once described to me as "a fart in a plastic
bucket", but pleasant enough to my ears to roll the window down to hear the
echo whenever I entered a tunnel).

So I don't think the car you saw was a strange hybrid, but a factory produced
model perhaps not imported into your locality.  I'm pretty sure there were
quite a few of them in the UK.

Dave J.
1982 GTV-6

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