Re: Giulia coupes, GTAs, GTVs & The Best Bits

[Scott Fisher <sefisher@domain.elided>]

Joe Garcia fills in some details on his dream GTV (which sounds
surprisingly like mine :-):

> The (probably) vague response to the long answer: I'd like--who 
> wouldn't?--the fastest car possible while keeping every shred of 
> docility intact. 

Sounds like my (admittedly short, and only as a passenger) ride in Don's
car.  Here's how to get what you want: balance all
reciprocating/rotating masses down to half-gram tolerances or better,
use the stock Borgo 10:1 pistons and liners from a '91 and up Spider
(any higher and you get fussy about gas), smooth the intake passages
(especially the lip just before the valve seat) but don't enlarge them,
match intake/exhaust manifolds perfectly, go to 45mm valves and sink the
valve seats, CC the combustion chambers for balance, use the stock 74
header, have Wes Ingram curve you a Spica cam, and use the Euro 2L
camshafts.  You can get more power over 4000 RPM (with a falloff below
that) by going to the 11mm or newer 11.1mm cams, but the Euro 2L cams
give great drivability.  I didn't catch what they were timed to; I
remember when Charlie Rockwell used to have the chassis dyno, he
recommended tweaking the cam timing to get a nice bump in power, so I'm
sure someone will respond with that information.

Oh, and the lighter flywheel helps some, letting the engine spin up (and
down) faster than the heavy stock unit.  It certainly makes the car
sound more aggressive in neutral -- it seems to rev up and down in about
one-third the time a stock 2L does when you blip the throttle.  The
high-dollar approach is an aluminum flywheel with a nickel friction
surface screwed into it; there is also some subtlety I didn't catch
about using a 131-tooth ring gear and a later starter, but to paraphrase
Ettore Bugatti, I'm interested in how cars go, not how they start.

> Also, for some weird reason, I am rather averse to having stuff
> machined to fit. Mind you, that doesn't mean I won't do it...just
> means that I'll feel weird. But those are a series of issues I 
> need to work out on my own.

Not at all -- if the car is meant to make *you* happy, then it shouldn't
require things that make you unhappy, right? :-)  My own equivalent of
this is: I don't want to make any irreversible changes.  Such as, even
if it were easy to cut the firewall and bolt in that lovely alumin-i-um
pedal box from the '74, I wouldn't gladly do that to my '67 because I
couldn't put it back to original later.  Who knows, one day I may get
religion and decide that I'd rather have a stock 1300 GT Junior than a
just-what-I-want hybrid hot-rod.  I might even paint it the factory
original color, that weird pale blue-green that Jody (the previous
owner) calls "Nazi mental-institution blue." 

> On more road worthy matters, I marginally prefer the 4.11 to the 
> 4.56, since the bulk of my driving (business or pleasure) does
> not involve quite that degree of acceleration.

Horses for courses.  Since my introduction to long-term Alfa ownership
was in a 1300, I can't figure out what people mean when they say they
don't want a car that revs at 4500 RPM at freeway speeds.  In the 1300,
that's 500 rpm below where the powerband starts (but 3000 RPM below
where it ends...)  But with the extra power on tap, having more relaxed
cruising would be a nice feature, especially if you do long trips in the
car.

> Les Singh points out a sad bit when he says the GTA head won't
> sit quietly atop the 2000.

In 1999, unless you have the al-yew-minnie-um coachwork to go along with
it, the GTA head is a very good way to spend way too much money for
something that doesn't work as well as modern developments.  Seriously,
the valve sizes are too small for a deep-breathing 2-liter (unless I'm
*completely* misremembering, stock GTA valves are 34mm and stock 2L
valves are 44mm -- who was it who called me "absurdly wrong" when I
misquoted the 1300 GTA Jr/1600 GTA valve sizes as being different a week
or so ago?), the combustion chambers for the 1600 would give you a
minimum of 12.5:1 CR (more if the GTA's CR is higher than the nominal
10:1 I used for my back-of-the-envelope calculations), and you'd have to
change over a lot of other bits in the engine as well.  

On the plus side, the valve angle and port geometry of the GTA was said
to be one of its strong points.  However, it's a simple matter of hard
work and lots of money to have someone build a 2L that puts out as much
power as an Autodelta GTA engine, with no doubt vastly better low-end
drivability due to the extra displacement.  And with modern equipment
and techniques, the engine should last you many years, even with the
bump in power.  It just costs about the same as a really nice stock GTV
to have the motor work done...  Oh welll, as I keep telling myself, if I
wanted cheap power, I should have bought an old Chevy Nova.

> I have however, recanted on the matter of air conditioning.

If I still lived in southern California and not northern California, I'd
respond with a hearty "and HOW" to that.  I know that a/c was available
on some '74 GTVs; my friend Chris used to have such a creature. 
Apparently, getting to the Spica on that one was an exercise in twisted
elbows and scraped wrists.

Let's see, have I thought of anything else since then?  I mention some
rear-suspension upgrades (Panhard rod, solid replacement for trunnion
with Heim-jointed trailing link to locate diff) in another posting, and
it seems that everyone is going to the adjustable upper A-arms to give
these cars some negative camber, so you'll want to investigate that. 
And I'm still a believer in the electric fan replacing the engine-driven
one, not only for removing any parasitic drag effect but mainly so the
car doesn't sound like a damn turboprop on acceleration.  And if you
want to drop some weight (in the car, not the driver... to those who
know me by sight, no comments, please :-), the usual racing sources make
fiberglass body panels (hood and trunk being the only ones I'd want to
put on a roadgoing car) and plexiglass side windows.  

I think this is most of the cookbook.  There are other tweaks and TRS
bits (braided stainless brake lines, carbon-kevlar pads, moving the
battery to the trunk, MSD ignitions, etc. etc. etc.) but those can all
be filled in later.  Or ignored. :-)

So... how does all this stuff work?  Well, the ride I had last Saturday
was one of the more thrilling I've ever had.  The car in question was
milder than some of the customer cars Don had built (a few of which were
on site); he used the less agressive cams to keep it drivable, and it
was *still* a rocket.  The sound, in particular, was electrifying, deep
and throaty and rich.  Best of all, the car's performance seemed to
improve the faster it went; speed seemed merely to bring on more speed,
more quickly.  Yet when we were just puttering around the driveway of
the shop, or positioning the car past traffic so we could safely see
what a full-throttle run to the redline felt like, it was as docile as
my stock '74 Spider.

I want one, desperately.  Actually, I want two: as much as I am in love
with my '67 Coupe and committed to bringing her back to life, I got out
of the Spider today (a crisp November morning, top down and ears just
feeling brisk) and asked myself, "And you want to put a high-performance
2-liter in any car other than THIS one because...?"

(The answer, of course, is in the way my heart sings when I go out to
the garage and see the dusty, sleeping form of my GT out there.  But... 
The plan, or perhaps a better phrase would be cover story, is this: I
put the hot-rod 2L in the Junior, but I save the original 1300 engine. 
When my conscience gets the better of me and I want the Junior to be
original again, I can put the 2L in my '74 Spider and rebuild the 1300
for the Junior.  Yeah, that's plausible. :-)

- --Scott

------------------------------

End of alfa-digest V7 #1155
***************************