Jumping on cue

[JHertzman@domain.elided]

Jack Hagerty writes:
>A Villa d'Este is a 6C2500, right?

"I believe so. AFAIK, the Villa was Touring's refinement of the 
Freccia d'oro (Golden Arrow) which was a 6C2500. The Freccia was 
Alfa's first postwar car and an early attempt at something like 
unibody construction. It still had a separate frame and body, but 
they were welded together rather than bolted.

"John, I beleive that's your cue to jump in here with an analysis 
and production history :-)"
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
OK. The Freccia d'Oro, a fastback two-door sedan, appeared in 1946 and the 
last one built was sold in March 1954; about 700 were built in eight years, 
mass-production by prior Alfa standards. A variant was the Coupe Gran 
Turismo, a notchback with closer-coupled seating built from early 1951 
through mid-1953, in 119 copies, also with the steel body welded to the 
platform chassis in the first stirrings (at Alfa) toward integral 
construction, which had been around for decades at Lancia. There were also 
about 160 four-door sedans built 1945-1950, and about eight hundred chassis 
for coachbuilders.

Touring built a Coupe Aerlux, closely derived from their last prewar bodies, 
which was a three-window coupe in American parlance; about fifteen were 
built. In 1949 they did a five-window (again, American parlance) with some 
further refinement of the Aerlux forms, and this won the prize in the 
September 1949 concours at the Villa Olmo, a.k.a. the Villa d'Este; something 
like 23 were built, plus a few examples of a "Villa d'Este con tettuccio 
Aerlux" and a "Helvetia" variant with a bit more headroom and legroom for the 
Swiss market, plus a few cabriolet versions.

The forms of the Villa d'Este were successfully translated for the first and 
second series Touring-bodied Alfa Romeo 1900 Sprint and Super Sprint from 
1951 on; probably half of the nearly 1800 Sprints built were patterned on the 
Villa d'Este. 

My recollection is that the car blown up in the film was a Freccia d'Oro, but 
I may be wrong. It may seem like a shame to blow up a classic Alfa for a 
footnote to a plot line, but the Freccias of the late forties probably rusted 
at least as badly as any Alfa of the sixties, and the car blown up could well 
have been mostly bondo and superficial paint on an unsalvageable pile of iron 
oxide. The attrition rate on standard Alfas, 1900 berlinas, Giulietta 
berlinas and others is pretty steep. How many Milanos do you think will be 
running thirty years from now?

John H. 

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