An Alfa Romeo star is reborn

Vintage car enthusiasts can look forward to seeing a classic Alfa Romeo here next year. Motoring editor ALASTAIR SLOANE reports.

The Alfa Romeo museum in Milan confirmed it: the 1921 model being restored by Sydney-based New Zealand businessman Neville Crichton is the only surviving model of the first Alfa Romeo built.

It is the Alfa Romeo G1, chassis and engine number 6108, the last of 52 originals. There were earlier Alfas, but they were built before Nicola Romeo bought the company in 1915 and christened it Alfa-Romeo.

He later dropped the hyphen, and in 1921 launched the G1. The museum says it regards the G1 as the first true Alfa Romeo.

Crichton, the director of Fiat and Alfa Romeo importers Ateco Automotive, plans to get the car in top running order again.

"It is a car to be driven - that's the whole point of an Alfa Romeo," he said. "We plan to complete the restoration and ensure that as many people can enjoy it by displaying it around New Zealand and Australia."

Crichton bought the G1 from Australian collector Julian Sterling in July last year, 79 years after it was imported from Italy by a Queensland businessman who went bankrupt and hid it in a shed away from creditors ... therein lies a great Australian yarn.

But first, the history of the G1. Alfa Romeo had its roots in the Societa Italinana Automobili Darracq (SIAD), founded in November 1906 to assemble French Darracq cars for the Italian market.

Darracq's products, however, were not suited to Italian needs, and plans to build 600 cars a year were revised. In 1908 it built just 300, in 1909 a mere 61.

SIAD was liquidated and the factory was bought by a group of Milanese businessmen who founded Anonima Lombardo Fabrica Automobili (Alfa).

The first Alfa cars were based on Darracq designs, but the company soon switched to making cars designed by a former Fiat engineer, Cavaliere Giuseppe Merosi. Before long Alfa was making 3100 cars a year.

In 1915, a year after the outbreak of the First World War, Romeo, a mining engineer and maker of a portable compressor known as "the Little Italian", took over the Alfa factory to build tractors, ploughs and aircraft engines. He called his company Alfa-Romeo.

When the war ended Alfa-Romeo returned to making cars. The hyphen was soon dropped and Merosi began work on the first car to be produced under the new name. It was the G1, powered by a six-cylinder side-valve 6330cc engine, the largest engine ever fitted to an Alfa Romeo.

Historians say one of the reasons Alfa Romeo built only 52 G1 models was because the car did only six miles to the gallon (1 litre/2.2km) - and arrived when fuel in Italy was expensive and in short supply.

The G1 was, however, advanced for its time. The engine, with two cast-iron blocks each of three cylinders, had a compression ratio of 4:6.1, produced 70 bhp (51kW) at a lazy 2100 rpm, a phenomenal 310Nm of torque at 1100 rpm, and drove through a four-speed gearbox.

The chassis was vintage, with semi-elliptical springs at the front and dual quarter-elliptics at the rear. The mechanical brakes worked on the cast-iron rear wheels only; the footbrake operated on the transmission. The fuel tank carried 75 litres. Unladen weight was 1500kg.

Back to the Australian businessman, its first owner ... The unnamed man bought the G1 new for £850 and drove it around Queensland until he went bankrupt in the stockmarket crash of 1929.

Three years later he died, without disclosing the car's whereabouts. The G1 remained hidden for 25 years before being discovered in a shed on a bush property.

A couple of young farm workers got it going and used it to round up cattle - before hitting a tree and smashing the front end. The engine survived and they towed it back to the homestead to use it to power a water pump. Its huge torque at low revs was ideal for the job.

In 1964 it was retired from pump duty and rescued by Alfa Romeo enthusiasts who sold it to a Queensland businessman and car enthusiast, Ross Flewell-Smith. He ignored the advice of experts and set out to get it going again. Smith found a second G1 wreck and, with the advice of Luigi Fusi, the curator of the Alfa Romeo museum, used the parts to put together the first G1 to a point where it won the 1977 Queensland Vintage Car Concours and the 1978 Australian Mile Miglia memorial run, where it clocked 86 mph (139 km/h).

In 1995, Flewell-Smith sold the car he had nicknamed "Milly from Milan" to Sterling, who commissioned further restoration.

All worn parts were replaced. New tyres, made from the original 1920s moulds and costing nearly $7500 for the set, were supplied by Michelin.

The restoration was described in the 1998 edition of the classic Car Yearbook as "breathtaking". The G1 is expected to be on show in New Zealand early next year.