Talented wordsmith Nathan was plucked from the relative obscurity of a cozy sub-editing job to help front the new Modern Classics magazine back in 2015.
If you speak to the locals, there’s a mythical beast that roams Exmoor. A bit more than the average feline: it’s thought to be a cougar or black leopard, released from a private zoo in the 1960s or ’70s after it was ruled unlawful to breed them in captivity outside public zoos.
But there’s so much more to this car than the way it looks, as we’ll discover. Is it a beast or pussycat?You can’t get away from how it looks, though. Whether you like it or not, it holds your attention, which was the plan all along. When Fiat took the Alfa Romeo reins from the Italian government in the mid-1980s, some feared that Alfa’s spirit may be lost via Fiat’s beancounters.
You’ll have already made up your mind on the looks. Since it broke cover in Switzerland, Robert Opron’s unmistakable design has dominated discussions. But there’s so much more to the SZ than the way it looks. From the surprisingly spacious interior, the only thing that’s focusing my attention is the glorious sound rasping out of the back of it. Under the glassfibre bonnet is a 12v version of Giuseppe Busso’s V6, in 3.0-litre single-cam form.
Emphatically no. Three decades of bellyaching over its looks have obscured its true talents. It’s far more than its paper numbers and its saloon-derived underpinnings. For its time, it was about as close to the full tarmac rally car experience as you could hope to get in a production car. Working with Zagato, who would build the car rather than design it, Pianta developed a car that though clearly related to the 75, was very different. The standard 75 suspension was junked for an independent system with transverse wishbones at the front, and a rigid de Dion rear axle with converging rods and a Watts linkage. Hydraulic telescopic dampers, anti-roll bars and uniball joints were put in place fore and aft.
You can tell the competition breeding, though the plush interior may convince you otherwise. The cabin was meant to be much more spartan, but that wouldn’t do for the company’s flagship that touched Porsche 928 S4 money. The dashboard wraps around you, the dials glowing green in the dark. There are also beautiful tan leather chairs, a Momo steering wheel and acres of space. I even had to move the seat forward a bit – a novelty, that.
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