After little more than a year of marriage, I must confess that I have strayed. My eye has wandered and there is another love in my life.
Yes, I attended the obligatory wedding classes taken by Padre Carmelo at St Peter’s Italian Church last year prior to wedding my wonderful wife (yes, she is reading over my shoulder as I type) on April 30th 2000. I listened carefully to what my priest and the other couples had to say about relationships and how a good marriage is ‘made, not born’ and I found the sessions to be educational and, on the whole, quite enjoyable.
But I am a man - and I am weak. So when the opportunity arose to reacquaint myself with a former love, I must admit that I grasped it with both hands. Now before all you gossip-mongers reach for your mobile phones to break this ‘philanderer’s tale’ to the News of the World, let me clarify that there is nothing kinky in the fact that I share my new love with my wife because the object of my desire is…an Alfa Romeo S.Z.
So what is an Alfa Romeo S.Z.?
In answering that question, I will also unfold the story of my on-going relationship with the car referred to by the Italian Press at its launch, rather unkindly, as “il Mostro” (the Monster).
Unveiled by Alfa Romeo at the Geneva Show in 1989 as the ES30 (Experimental Sports 3000) Concept Car -it was a 2-seater sports coupe designed to showcase Alfa’s racing heritage in an ultra-modern design utilising the very latest construction techniques available at the time.
I first laid eyes on the S.Z. (Sprint Zagato in case you’re wondering) at the Birmingham NEC Motorshow in 1989. A bright-eyed, impressionable 21 year-old automotive design student at Coventry Polytechnic, I was immediately bewitched by the brutish menace of the car’s ‘attitude’ and clicked away madly with my Dixons own-brand 35 mm fixed focus camera. It’s blunt yet aggressive red nose (no comic relief there) wrapped into subtly sculpted (yet still slab-like) side panels, coldly chopped into a squared-off tail and topped by a sleek dark grey teardrop canopy worthy of any supercar exotica.
The aerodynamic body of thermosetting metacrylic resin and fibreglass was designed at the Centro Stile Alfa Romeo using CAD (Computer-aided design) which enabled the project’s gestation period to be kept to a minimum. I found the design of the S.Z. hard to rationalise or justify, yet I felt emotionally affected by it and this for me, was a significant criteria of a good design. I loved it - but I couldn’t quite explain why.
The S.Z. was assembled by the renowned Italian coachbuilder Zagato, where the body was bonded to a steel frame to produce a chassis of outstanding torsional rigidity which would contribute to its delivery of extraordinary handling and roadholding characteristics – particularly for a road-going car. I discussed the S.Z. with my fellow students. Some loved il Mostro and others hated it. Nobody was indifferent. Ignoring the S.Z. was not an option. It graced the covers of every major car magazine over the following 18
