1958 Alfa Romeo Giulietta Sprint Veloce

Notoriously difficult to restore, with very fussy interiors

Dear SCM: Thank you for the glowing review and the raising the bar on Alfa Giulietta Sprint Veloces in the January issue of SCM. This recent eBay result (item #2421596395, ending July 2, 2003) will help substantiate the elevated pricepoint that SCM supports. These fine cars are finally getting their appropriate respect in the market.-Santo Spadaro, via e-mail

I clicked on the attached link, and found the car that had sold was in fact the exact car that we had profiled in our January issue. Giulietta Sprint Veloces are important, and indeed undervalued cars. Finding one that made a strong price at both a land auction (RM, Monterey, August 2002, sold at $36,300) and on eBay just 11 months later for nearly the same amount, $34,300, caused me to revisit this Sprint.

But there’s more. On checking back through my own records, I found that I had sold this car to a Florida Alfa fanatic (and a fanatic cheapskate, as well, over a decade ago). But more on that later.

Here’s an excerpt of what the seller had to say in his eBay listing.

I bought this car in August of 2002 at the RM auction in Monterey, where it had been consigned from a prominent Southern California collection. It has benefited from a no-expense-spared ownership, having recently been taken back down to its bare metal and repainted because of a single flaw. The resulting silver repaint is stunning. The front seats were recently redone in the correct, period, blue-gray corduroy leatherette combination.

Originally delivered with the Veloce package, this special car performs exceptionally well. In a further effort to bring the Alfa to near-perfect condition, the clutch and throw-out bearing were replaced. As a testament to its pristine condition, this example recently won Best Alfa at a concours.

It is an expertly restored car that started from an original Sprint Veloce and returned to better-than-new standards both visually and mechanically. The Giulietta series was the linchpin of Alfa Romeo’s success, and upon inspection of this Sprint Veloce it is easy to understand why.

{analysis} For those not familiar with Alfa lore, Alfa was best-known before WWII for its thunderous, supercharged six- and eight-cylinder cars, the 6C 1750s and 8C 2300s and 2900s. The Ferraris of their era, they simply outclassed everything else on the road.

After the war, Alfa struggled along, building at first pre-war six-cylinder designs, and then the more sporty four-cylinder 1900s. But it wasn’t until the lithe Giulietta Sprint was launched in 1954 that Alfa began to achieve, once again, worldwide acclaim.

While the Spider was more popular in the US, in Europe the Sprint, especially the factory hot-rod Veloce version, became the consummate café-racer. Pulling 90 hp out of its dual-cam 1300-cc all-alloy engine, the Veloce came factory equipped with dual Weber DC03 carburetors, forced cold-air induction, a two-piece finned aluminum sump, high-lift cams, mechanical advance distributor, a larger gas tank, larger front brakes and more.

The tach didn’t even start until 2,000 rpm-after all, who would let his Veloce engine, with its 8,000-rpm redline, stay below 2,000 for long?

Giulietta Sprints are notoriously difficult to restore, cosmetically, as their interior and door panels are filled with fussy, hard-to-source bits. The mechanicals are a bit easier, as they are relatively robust, and a comprehensive supply of parts exists both here and in Italy.

When I first saw this car, it was still with its original owner in Berkeley, California. I don’t recall how I heard about it, but I went to see it and was impressed by how non-mucked-with it was. Although it had been repainted once, sometime in the late ’80s, it was in its original shade of robin’s-egg blue. It still had the original, and slightly goofy-looking, mattress-tacking interior. All of the chrome was intact and the engine sounded good and pulled strongly. There were no dents, and no evidence that the car had ever been rusty. The seller wanted $15,000.

A subscriber to SCM who lived in Florida was looking for a Veloce in this condition and asked me to buy the car for him. I did, somewhat to my regret. You see, I didn’t charge him a commission (after all, I’m in the magazine business and not a car broker). But since the money was wired to my aging grandmother’s account in San Francisco, I asked if he would sent her a check for $250, as a thoughtful gift to compensate her for the hassle of going to the bank, withdrawing the money, etc.

He refused and I sent her some money instead, but I’ve never forgotten what a cheapskate the fellow was. He never thanked me, or her, for finding him the car.

In any event, he restored the Giulietta, and my understanding is that just prior to his death, he sold it along with some other cars he had. It was restored when he sold it, and the new owner had it restored again, to even higher standards.

For too long, Sprint Veloces have been undervalued and underappreciated by collectors at large. Our own Price Guide lists them at $18,000-$22,500, a number that now needs to be revised upwards. Granted, this car was a number-one, rather than a number-two car that our guides value, but nonetheless, I would think that $22,500-$28,000 would be a fair market valuation for a number-two Giulietta Sprint Veloce in today’s market.

Further, I find it to be most interesting that this Veloce would sell, for nearly identical prices, at two quite dissimilar venues. It bodes well for both land auctions and electronic ones that a good car, properly presented, can make the same money at both.-Keith Martin{/analysis}