A SPOONFUL OF PANNA COTTA
The history of Alfa Romeo is dotted with little known models, as the marque constantly inspired countless enthusiasts’ projects. Some of these remained just colourful dots on the brand’s timeline, while others ended up casting enormous shadows. One of the latter ones is the Sprint Veloce Zagato, the car that originated a long line of factory sanctioned Zagato models.
You surely think it’s a mistake, right? It’s not the SVZ, as much as it is the SZ, certainly. Well, no, in fact the spelling is correct. This car is literally born out of an accident. The phrase is often abused, but, for once, there is no exaggeration. It was the remains of a racing Giulietta Sprint, after a sorry excursion to a riverbed, while racing in the Mille Miglia, that led to the creation of the a car looking very much like our cream example. Bertone quoted an enormous repair bill, that prompted the owner to ask Zagato to step in. In true Zagato fashion, they worked out that they could hammer together a completely new body for less than it took Bertone to repair theirs. No, they were not cheap, but the two mythical design houses always worked on very different philosophies. Zagato was all about performance, about the minimal resources spent for maximum impact, while Bertone were obsessive perfectionists, losing sleep over every shutline detail, every door handle or millimetre of imperfection. No such worries over on the other side at Zagato. Just get the right hammer, fit the body as tight as you can over the mechanicals and get the car out on track to start winning races.
Our delightful panna cotta Giulietta has an irresistible puppy face cuteness, as if the time it took to make it did not allow the design to fully mature, remaining perennially stuck in an age of innocence. The simplicity of the surfacing makes a Porsche 356 look complex by comparison and the body is so small that it makes the lithe Giulietta Sprint looks like a giant. But don’t be fooled by the highly huggable appearance, this spoonful of Italian passion has the internals of a race car, with all the temperamental mood swings you can expect to derive from that DNA. Our friends at Pendine Historic Cars assure us that it takes real skill to masterfully extract the full potential out of this car. It’s beauty tricks the air to effortlessly pass around it, while the internals buzz in anger. True to Zagato’s heritage, the combination is spectacularly successful. Alfa Romeo took notice of the package and this resulted in the birth of the SZ, that ignited the genesis of a long line of highly successful race cars, as beautiful as they are fast.
As you get close to the car, the nature of its construction immediately becomes apparent. The hammer marks, the finger sized gaps between the headlight covers and the wings, the not exactly mathematical disposition of the screws holding the plexiglass windows. To our eyes, accustomed to the modern day clinical computer aided precision, this looks very alien. One part of the brain refuses to understand how that is possible, while the other half feels inspired. You really want to pick up a piece of metal and a hammer and build your own. It will definitely not be as easy as it looks, but it will have your own mark on it. And when those eyes smile back at you, after a crazy race, you can always formulate a galant winners’ excuse for the occasional lack of symmetry. It almost feels like it has battle scars, even before getting into action, like a pair of prestressed jeans. It certainly encourages you to drive it hard, showing no mercy to the random bushes of branches that stray away a little too close to the racing line.
I always thought that this car will only look good on narrow roads, in confined spaces, that closely mimic its intended habitat. In the wide open space between the massive hangars of the Bicester Heritage compound, I discovered, to my surprise, just how well the design holds its own against the horizon hugging expanse of space. It only takes this lovely spoonful of simple panna cotta to sweeten up even the most ominous of days. Sometimes, it’s the simple things that can inadvertently bring about the greatest of changes.
