Remember when you were scared of monsters? Well the scariest thing about a monster is
the unknown — you don't know what it is! That's not a monster! That's just Stewie! Hi! ...and
like a Pug the Alfa Romeo SZ is, ummm, ugly (sorry buddy!) So ugly in fact
that internally Alfa Romeo referred to this as Il Mostro – the monster but like my mom used to say,
"Jason, don't worry ugly is only skin deep it's what's on the inside that counts!"
And if you pull back the skin of the SZ you'll find an old formula one car!
We all know that there's a point at which something is so ugly
that it's cute... but that is a subjective evaluation.
and besides you've already made up your mind about whether you like or
hate the SZ I love it but that's a question of styling what i find more interesting to discuss
is design and that is a very different discussion hey buddy design incorporates every facet of a
car including efficiency of packaging performance of its intended function a lack of excess weight
and so on so the SZ styling wasn't just ugly it was horrible from a design perspective as well!
the SZ is an Alfa Romeo Milano underneath called 75 to those outside the U.S. same wheelbase same
suspension powertrain blah blah and you'd think a two-seat sports car based on a four-seat family
sedan would be lighter and would have a ton more cargo space than the sedan it's based on
this monster doesn't even have a trunk it has a space saver spare and a fuel tank
then that's it in the space where a back seat would be we have um nothing and its
body panels were heavy very heavy because this was effectively a steel chassis Milano underneath with
injection-molded thermoplastic resin body panels glued to it well it didn't weigh any less than the
sedan at least it had 210 horsepower which was enough to get it to 60 in under seven seconds
and it sounded great doing so because that is a Busso, the best sounding v6 of all time
it was still in its original 12-valve form and it was that form's largest displacement
3.0 liters and it was in a more aggressive state of tune than it was in the Milano Verde.
Giuseppe Busso died three days after the last of his v6 engines was built which is both
incredibly sad and very romantic but he was more than just the designer of this v6
in fact it was his goal to create a road-going car with the same drivetrain and suspension
layout as the original Alfetta, which was a formula one car created in the late 1930s
the Alfa Romeo 158's nickname meant Little Alfa the Alfetta dominated racing in the equivalent
of today's formula two category and then it was put on hold for several years during a small um
interruption perhaps you've heard of it it was called World War II
in 1950 the Alfetta came roaring back winning every single race it entered in the new formula
one series - at 12 years old! the Alfetta was slightly modified for '51 with a de Dion rear
axle becoming the 159 and it only won four out of its seven races but wound up on the podium for the
other three so the team boss was probably not too upset don't forget the boss was a man named
Enzo Ferrari perhaps you've heard of him? enzo... enzo ferrari? Anyway the Alfetta race car's
drivetrain layout became the blueprint for the 1972 Alfetta street cars both sedan and coupe this
was the Busso dream years later the Alfetta coupe matured into the GTV6 and the Alfetta sedan became
the Milano or 75 named to celebrate Alfa Romeo's 75th birthday and the 75 gave birth to the SZ and
that lineage means the SZ's layout is the same as the 1951 Alfa Romeo 159 — the formula one car!
okay so it had decades of improvement but it still had the engine at the front
and a transaxle at the back this time with inboard disc brakes to reduce unsprung weight
the de Dion rear axle isn't really high tech it's not independent and it was invented in the 1800s
but what it did do is give the SZ the same benefits as all the other transaxle Alfa Romeos,
meaning a really nice ride and very predictable limit handling the SZ added in the lessons that
Alfa had learned racing the 75 in IMSA and FIA Group A. The plastic panels may have been
heavy but they were bonded to the steel chassis resulting in a body that was according to Alfa
20 percent stiffer than if it were made from only steel as such the SZ's handling was compared to
the best cars of its day things that included the original Acura NSX and the Lotus Esprit
ironically there was nothing really new about the SZ's suspension except that it had a hydraulic
height adjustment system to raise its height by almost two inches but the question remains why
would Alfa bother to make this crazy looking coop and not just a two-door Milano or the
awesome-looking station wagon it was considering well in 1986 FIAT took control over Alfa Romeo and
wanted to send a message that Alfa was back so it came up with the ES-30 the experimental sports car
3.0 liters and it had to go from concept to production in only 19 months so it
challenged three different departments to make the styling for the attention-grabbing coupe. First
was Alfa's in-house design department second was Fiat's in-house design department and third was
designer and coach builder Zagato. Under the watch of Walter de silva the man later responsible for
some recent Audi masterpieces Alfa Romeo centro stile came up with a soft rounded design that
looked more like the later Proteo concept car Fiat Centro Stile came up with a design
that eventually went into production it was one of the first cars designed completely by CAD.
clearly that 1980s computer-aided design couldn't process surfaces in three dimensions and the CAD
program seems to have crashed entirely while it was rendering the rear end because it just sort
of stops and the last thing you'd ever expect from a car that's made of nothing but straight lines is
a curved windshield i mean somebody put this whole greenhouse on backwards the computer crashed!
The computer crashed! This this is a bug!
here's the best part: Walter de Silva, who was in charge of Alfa Romeo's design department when
this was designed went on record to say he had nothing to do with it. and then so did Zagato!
i mean i've seen plenty of designers try to take credit for each other's work but i've
never seen a car where so many designers threw their hands in the air and were like wasn't me!
Zagato saying wasn't me is especially crazy since SZ stood for Sprint Zagato named after the
original Giulietta Sprint Sagato now look if you look back through history Zagato's trademark is
vehicles with designs that are um... challenging so it's easy to assume that the Alfa Romeo Sprint
Zagato which is challenging to look at and has a Zagato badge on it might have been designed...
by Zagato!
but, and you're not gonna believe this, Zagato's proposal was even uglier! after
building a thousand or so SZs for Alfa Romeo, Zagato designed and then built the RZ (the
roadster version) which, in true Zagato style was somehow even uglier than the car it was based on!
It was perfectly on brand for Zagato!
that takes talent especially since the SZ was so incredibly bizarre looking to begin with
but the RZ was one bizarre too far. Of the 350 planned, Alfa was able to sell only 278 before
it had to pull the plug. Polarizing design is a bit of a double-edged sword because it means
a car will appeal to far fewer people however those who like it will love it but there weren't
really enough of those so the SZ was a tough sell especially since it was almost as expensive as the
more usable Porsche 911. The better any car is it being a transportation device when it's new
well then the less special it becomes when it's a collectible and so by that measure the SZ is
completely off-the-chart special, especially when you consider how it drives. the styling
might have been polarizing but the verdict is unanimous on the way this thing drives it is
one hell of a driver's car that Busso revs and blips like a motorcycle engine and this version
pulls so hard up top that it's unlike any other Busso! the suspension's great the steering is
great the visibility is amazing this is the most fun you can have in any car from this era period.
Today we might think of beauty when we talk of the Alfa Romeo brand but this is the company
that created Enzo Ferrari and vice versa. Historically Alfa Romeo was all about racing
the SZ was the last Alfa Romeo of that era. Il Mostro wasn't just a monster because of
how it looked it was a monster because of the enormity of what it represented.
Get to know it a little bit better and turns out even the scariest monsters can be pretty cute
okay so you're just gonna keep the Ferrari framed out the entire time right yep okay
action i'm not some rich youtuber asking you to like and subscribe hey up up up up up up up up up
up keep the Ferrari out i'm an automotive journalist asking you to like and subscribe
and that's because that's how youtube works if you don't click those buttons youtube
doesn't know you liked what you've just seen and isn't going to show you any more of it
and if you don't like what you've just seen well join the club
and by that i mean the Hagerty Drivers Club which gets you access to this award-winning magazine
as well as discounts on amazing stuff and if if you still don't like what you've seen well then
just leave a nasty comment because that's how the internet works i need to go clean that up.