1983 Alfa Romeo Alfasud – Car & Classic Fleet

Lets start with the elephant in the room. No, my Alfasud isn’t rusty. No, I don’t wash it with a brush and dustpan to hand. No, I don’t call it Emental. Or My Whole-y Hatchback, or Sir Rustalot. Guffaw, guffaw…

Yes, it’s an Alfasud, the car that is to rust what Taylor Swift is to oversharing. Brilliantly designed by Giugiaro and engineered by Rudolph Hruska, its downfall was being built by workers more interested in harvesting tomatoes than building agile saloons.

This 1983 Ti ‘Quadrifoglio’ Green Cloverleaf is my third, part of a – virtually – unbroken run of Sud ownership dating back to the mid ’90s when I first had some spare cash burning an Alfa Romeo-shaped hole in my pocket. I wanted an Alfasud since I cycled past a black Green Cloverleaf in Norwich of all places in the late ’80s. Hardly Turin but I identified with a car that was ostensibly not as good as its competitors and yet was somehow much more interesting.

I’d heard about the Alfasud from gushing magazine articles, but never seen one. With good reason. By the early ’80s when that black car hit the road, Alfasud sales were dead in the water. Only diehard fans would risk their hard earned on a rusty Italian hot hatch. It took me 10 years to achieve that accolade. Spool forward again to 2009 and I’m buying this car. It was a lucky find. After a self-imposed gap in Alfasud ownership I’d posted a Desperately Seeking Alfasud thread on a forum. I got an email from the owner’s partner. She’d bought it a few years earlier and was the second owner. After discovering it didn’t have power steering she barely drove it and put it into storage. It had only done 37,000 miles.

It was sitting in their car port and he wanted rid of it. I’m still not sure what her view on it was as we never met. I rushed down to London to view it and once there I politely endured the seller’s lengthy monologue about how awful the Alfasud was and how good the Astra GTE was. I bought it quickly, partly to shut him up but also because it was clearly very good and he had no real idea what he had. We agreed a price and shook hands.

A week or so later I went back to pick it up. He’d had second thoughts. He wanted more money. In his small living room, a tense Alfa-shaped stand-off ensued. I capitulated. If he’s reading this, the Astra GTE is nowhere near as good as an Alfasud.

My plan was to use it sparingly but regularly. Over the subsequent 15 years that hasn’t quite panned out. I’ve driven it 5,000 miles, or an average 330 miles a year. Some years I haven’t driven it at all. This is a cruel side effect of running a classic car business, which I did for most of those 15 years. Sometimes you just want to get away from old cars, and usually that sometimes involves those periods when you would have time to drive your own classic car.

There have been some memorable trips though. I live close to the Malvern Hills and Welsh Borders. Day-long runs out, connecting some of my favourite roads, prove why these cars were so beloved of family buyers in the ’70s and ’80s. There are quicker hot hatches of course but the Alfasud’s pin sharp steering and chassis balance, helped by excellent weight distribution from that low-slung Boxer engine, make flowing and tight B roads an absolute delight to navigate.

The sparing use has kept the mileage down and means it’s probably one of the lowest mileage Alfasuds TI Green Cloverleafs of the 60 or so still remaining. The upside of running a classic car business is that it has been maintained in a ratio far outweighing its actual use. That has included a full restoration and respray in 2019. More recently I’ve concentrated on the mechanical fettling, including timing belts and a carb tune up.

2024 has involved a couple of suitably spotterish pursuits that I suspect will appeal to certain enthusiasts. I’ve had a dealer sticker remade from the original garage – Pagetts of Cheam – and a pair of replacement numberplates from former Alfa Romeo dealership Kingham’s. The dealership displayed the car in its showroom in the late ’90s and is fortunately still going.

It now runs superbly, the car revving smoothly through the range and it thrives on revs, picking up power from 4,000rpm as it should. Keep it on song and it even mixes with modern traffic.

I have long harboured a plan to drive it to Italy, a country I love. Perhaps combining a trip to the Alfa Romeo museum with a visit to the Pomigliano D’Arco plant in Naples where the car was built. It is a tempting pipe dream that will depend on how well my right hip can withstand the left-canted pedals for 2,000 miles…

Every time I get behind the wheel I’m reminded what a mental health top up this little 41 year old car is to me. Finding time to drive it more on wiggly roads is definitely my new priority.