Tipo 116.69, etc (was: Balocco register)

["John Hertzman" <johnhertzman@domain.elided>]

Mark Mucciacciaro, 'Balocco' owner, replied to my skepticism about the many
sources for a 116.70 type number:

"I guess I should have said 'a few' instead of 'many'.  The first one that
comes to mind is the Centerline catalog.  In the front you will find a kind of
decoder which is supposed to help you ID your car.

"I have seen this list in other places on the web. I'll never remember where
right now, but I saw it enough times to make me wonder what was going on with
the .70 designation."

So I pulled my Centerline catalog (#12, fwiw) to look it up, and the model
identification chart on page one gives 119.69 for the GTV 6, no .70. The '119'
part is, I believe, incorrect; the only 119 cars were the Alfa Sei, the large
sedan with the V6, De Dion, and front-mounted ZF transmission.

There actually was a 116.70, but it didn't make it to production; it was the
GTV 6 with automatic transmission. (The right-hand drive automatic GTV 6 was
the 116.75, the 116.64 and 116.65 were the left and right hand drive automatic
transmission versions of the face-lifted four cylinder Alfetta coupes.) These
were project numbers of prototypes, which were usually but not always carried
over as production type numbers if the project went into production (or even
was approved for production; the 119.11 was the USA version of the Sei, of
which just three were built for EPA certification.)

In my note in AD9-0328 I had written "The last of the transaxle cars, the 90
and the 75, were tipo 162 cars - - ", but Centerline lists the Milano as a
161. D'Amico & Tabucchi call them all 162. The only company literature I have
which covers this territory is the "75 Caratteristiche e Prescrizioni" book;
it gives two listings of 'Identificazione dei Modelli' and 'Targhetta di
Identificazione', the first for cars built by Alfa Romeo S.p.A. (that is,
before Fiat) and the second for cars built by Alfa Lancia Industriale S.p.A.
(that is, after the Fiat takeover, effective January 1 1987). The Alfa Romeo
S.p.A. Targhetta di Identificazione carried two sets of numbers, a 'codice
interno' which was 161 (plus suffix) and a 'tipo vettura' which was 162 (plus
suffix); the Alfa Lancia Industriale S.p.A. Targhetta di Identificazione
carried just the 'tipo vettura' which was 162 (plus suffix), identified more
fully as 'Tipo base e versione della vettura." So Centerline's '161' is not
without grounds, but the '162' isn't wrong either. Nice cars, either way -

Enjoy yours,

John H.
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