1965 Alfa Romeo Giulia TZ

This car, Lot 15, sold for $1,364,998 (£1,181,250), including buyer’s premium, at Gooding & Company’s London, U.K., auction on September 3, 2022.

The Rolling Stones had a knack for putting truisms to music: “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need.”

We’d all love to have a Ferrari 250 GTO, but for most save for an extraordinary few, it just isn’t possible. The follow-up question is simple: What is the best alternative experience to a GTO that is available, if not to ordinary mortals, at least moderately privileged ones? More or less direct competitors like the 250 SWB (the GTO was never actually homologated; it technically raced as a special-bodied SWB), the Aston Martin DB4GT and the Jaguar E-type Lightweight are all way out of range for most, so what does that leave us?

I will argue that the only serious contenders for early to mid-1960s GT racing are the Porsche 904 GTS and our subject, the Alfa Romeo Giulia Tubolare Zagato, or Giulia TZ. (We can leave the Porsche for another time.)

Born to race

Alfa Romeo has been committed to racing from its earliest days. In the 1930s, Alfa was Italy’s de facto national team, and after the war it got right back into things with the Alfetta racers in Formula One. By the early 1950s Alfa had realized that it simply couldn’t afford Grand Prix racing and folded its racing tent to concentrate on building performance-oriented street cars.

In 1954, Alfa introduced the new Giulietta series, using a light, high-revving 1,300-cc twin-cam 4-cylinder engine and an advanced chassis design with attractive body options. It has been said that Italians will race anything, and the Giulietta was the answer to their dreams; they raced swarms of them.

Alfa was certainly willing to assist in these endeavors and created the Veloce subvariant. The story goes that in regular production, any time a particularly good piece was noticed, it got set aside. Occasionally, the entire factory line shut down and spent a week building the Veloce with the accumulated best pieces. These cars got twin Weber carburetors, hotter cams and very careful assembly. The tachometer had a start pin at 2,500 rpm; there was no purpose in running the engine slower than that.

In 1956, a racing customer rolled his Giulietta Sprint Veloce and took it to Zagato to have the body replaced. The result was lighter, prettier and more aerodynamic, and it became somewhat of a sensation in Italian racing. One thing led to another, and soon Alfa was sending Veloce chassis directly to Zagato. The Sprint Zagato (SZ) entered the Alfa catalog.

Light, quick and purposeful

Giuseppe Busso was Alfa’s chief engineer; he had moved back to Alfa after his early days with Ferrari and racing was truly in his blood. He had been collaborating with Abarth through much of the late 1950s with an eye toward building a purpose-built racer with Alfa power, and he had mostly settled on a design. When Alfa decided to upgrade production to the 1,600-cc Giulia series and had some money to spend, the project got moved in-house.

Busso had designed a tubular space frame that was low, wide and stiff — weighing only 138 pounds — and gave Zagato a free hand to create an extremely light and slippery body shape to cover it. Front suspension was a combination of standard Giulia components and bespoke pieces; the rear was an innovative IRS approach with inboard disc brakes. Both ends allowed total suspension adjustability for race tuning.

The engine, transmission and differential gears were standard Giulia, with magnesium used where possible to lighten casings. Over the years, Alfa had developed a wide variety of gear ratios for transmission and rear end, which gave plenty of choice for racing applications.

The interior was complete but minimal, with no sound deadening and little weather sealing, which had the advantage of weighing almost nothing. (In the day, Road & Track tested a new TZ and drove into a rainstorm; both driver and passenger got their feet soaked.)

The official weight for the TZ was 1,400 pounds. The one sitting in my shop makes 155 horsepower at the wheels, so the TZ is quick, particularly on a tight course.

I have driven a TZ on the track and can personally attest that they are a joy to drive, light and easy with lots of power and that particular slight Alfa understeer that makes it difficult to get into serious trouble. It is one of those Italian cars that just begs to be driven faster and cornered harder, waiting impatiently for you to push it to the edge. It is happiest at the limit. That said, they are terrible on the street: rough, noisy, hot (or cold), uncomfortable and uncooperative at anything less than flat-out. About half of the production were technically stradale (street) versions, but I cannot imagine one being used that way.

Buyer beware

If you want to find the exotic Italian GT racing experience for under $2 million, though, the TZ is where you end up. Any buyer needs to be diligent when searching. With few bespoke castings, a hand-built frame and body, and mostly production mechanicals, they are notoriously easy to replicate. Most of the real ones led hard lives and were not well cared for. Of the 112 cars Alfa built, around 10 are great, roughly 40 are really good, and 60 are somewhat-to-horribly compromised. An additional 50 or so are complete fakes. Racing history (particularly factory history) makes the great ones, known provenance and originality marks the good ones, and it goes down from there. Be careful.

The market has a clear understanding of TZs, with the great ones running today at about $1.6m, really good ones between $1.3m and $1.5m, and compromised ones well below that. The market has been steadily drifting upward. I know of a car that was bought for $1,300,000 in 2017 and is probably worth $1,450,000 now.

Excellent provenance, fair price

Alfa TZs have always been considered great cars. The late Alain de Cadenet once told me that he bought his first Ferrari 250 GTO, just an old race car then, because he couldn’t afford a new TZ. But they have only been recognized as highly desirable in the last 15 years or so. In 2000, a good TZ was a $250,000 car and by 2011 one of the great ones was $900,000. The buying frenzy stopped about 2018, but there are still more buyers than sellers, so values have not dropped.

Our subject car had unquestioned, fully documented history and provenance and was correct and original. Its racing history was mostly Italian club racing, though, so it didn’t have big-race glamour. It also sold in the U.K. to a European buyer, so the weakness of the euro and pound made the U.S.-dollar value seem a bit low. Considering everything, it was an excellent car that sold for a more-than-fair price. ♦

(Introductory description courtesy of Gooding & Company.)