Category: fun stuff

Giulia Sprint Speciale 10121*381303.  This clean, good looking Giulia SS is being auctioned by Coys in Germany on September 26 2015.  Advertisement I saw is on Hemmings.com for Coys Frankfurt motorshow.  This is a new car to my register, I’ll have to count and see where we are with the survivor count.

Looks more bluette than bosphor to me.   Both good colors.  Italy to USA to Japan to Switzerland and now for sale in Germany.

Continue reading “Market 508: SS 381303 at auction by Coys in Germany”

There is something irresistible about a top ten list.  Whether its hamburgers, airlines, supermodels or carnivorous plants, it’s always fun to critique and/or learn something new.  After much consideration, here are my top ten production Giuliettas.  I’ll do a non-production variation later with prototypes, re-bodies and such.  What are your top ten?

1.  Giulietta Sprint Zagato Coda Tronca.  Beautiful, elegant, purposeful and rare.  Alfa and Zagato together at the inception of what would become the TZ series.    With what 17 (or is it 35) ?? built, it’s among the lowest number production Giulietta variant.  They are expensive, but seem like they ought to be more expensive than they are.

Continue reading “Top 10 Production Alfa Giuliettas”

I started a campaign at Patreon to allow readers to support the site if they chose.  It’s basically Kickstarter in a monthly pledge form -kind of like my local NPR station is doing right now.

I’ve been enjoying writing lately and I think having an awareness of the value readers put on what I do would be helpful to keep me focused (Carrot) and that failing, motivated by a sense of obligation (stick).

Any money pledged not spent on site maintenance is going to go in my “hire a developer” fund to make the $8000 – $10000 worth of changes I am hoping to make sometime by the end of 2016.  What kind of changes you ask?  Well, The register is an amazing resource on one hand, and a disaster to use on the other.  The redesign will make it much easier to use, and give readers a chance to take over adding information about their cars if they want.  Also on the redesign menu will be a files section where I put scans of manuals, brochures etc for use by readers.  There is a lot more, but it’s hard to communicate without a chalk board.

If Patreon seems a little weird, you can still just make a donation via the button on the “Support Giuliettas” page up there below that picture of my car I need to replace.

Thanks!

Continue reading “Support your local Giuliettas blogger!”

Update September 15 2015: 54 is a lot of bids!  $25,355 is decent money.

Giulia Spider 1600 10123*373466.  This car is on eBay available out of Waynesville North Carolina.  Seller says “At this time I am only interested in selling one car from my collection and this Alfa is the easiest to get out.”  Neat collection and as good a criteria as any other I suppose for choosing which car to sell.  Car is not too bad looking, could probably be put on the road with a couple weekends work if the engine and clutch are healthy.

Not a bad nose.  Bumpers will need attention, or to be removed in pursuit of a sporty look.  Good starting point.

Continue reading “Market 502: Spider 10123 373466 ‘closest to the door’”

No, that title is not a typo, and this post is not from 39 years in the future, but it is about the future.  I have been having a lot of conversations about technology, especially self driving cars lately, and this post is in reaction to those conversations, and anticipates / explores that topic through a possible experiential evolution of my Sprint ownership.

Continue reading “Alfa Romeo Giulietta turns 100!”

First, I want to thank all you who have written me emails encouraging me to get back to writing the blog. I really appreciate the concern. No, this site will not die, no, I haven’t given up on it forever. After Fuelist fizzled out I needed to take a break from cars for a minute, but now I am feeling inclined to get back at it – especially considering I am weeks if not days from being reunited with my Sprint. Being a dad and fulltime engineer (again) has made heavy demands on my time, but no so much that I can’t contribute here once in a while.

So, that out of the way, here are some pictures of the work that has been done to my Sprint. Engine is looking phenomenal as is the engine compartment. I highly recommend Toms work if you are considering having someone work on your Sprint, Giulietta, or Alfa in general.

Almost a shame to cover this up with an engine.

---

Unless it’s this engine.  Yep – that’s a programmable distributor I got from Classicalfa.com.

That spin on filter came with the car.  Headers are 1600 Giulia items.

Bling has been liberally applied.

I heard from Russ that he sold Sprint Speciale 380548 in the early 2000’s and it changed hands a few times quickly there after including a trip through eBay.  Anyone here have this car now?  I ask because the original engine can be made available to the current owner.

I just got forwarded this post from Vintagent Paul.

Shucks…

 

The hush-hush project I have been working on since last Spring, that has taken all the time I used to devote to giuliettas.com, is now live!

Over the last 5 years I have spent a lot of time thinking of better ways to display Giulietta sales records on this site.  In February 2013 I was having a conversation about this problem with two friends I was working with at a start up when the idea came to us: lets build a Redfin/Zillow type tool where you could find classic vehicle sales comps for classic and specialty motorcycles and cars.  Not editorial on sales, not links to disparate data sources, but the hard facts of the transaction extracted from these sources, parsed, and made immediately graphically accessible to anyone.

The three of us officially started the business, and between April 2013 and August 2013 the project was worked on by a single part-time developer, and by us on late nights and other stolen hours until an old friend put us in touch with public company The Chancellor Group (CHAG), who saw merit in what we were trying to do and bought a stake in the company.  With cash in the bank we went into full focus, assembled a team and building what you see when you go to www.thefuelist.com.

Results for group “Giulietta & Giulia 750 & 101 Models”.

Details of a Giulia Sprint 10112 sale.  One of you probably owns this car!

For a classic vehicle sale record to make the cut, it must have a verifiable sale price and a minimum of information about the vehicle.  We built a vehicle database of model attributes so we could supply the user with more information than a seller typically includes in a sale, and to power filters users could select to refine results to only the attributes they are interested in.  If you look at the tool you will get an idea what these are.  These refinement tools will be rolling out over the next few months.

A key feature is the ability to graph up to 4 models or model groups simultaneously to see how prices compare, have changed over time, and what you can buy for the same money among the different models.  Graphing all Giuliettas and Porsche 356s together demonstrates this nicely.  We are working on trend lines at the moment, but it’s turned out to be a very complex problem.

Each record is curated by hand, so there will be the inevitable human errors creeping in, but we have feedback mechanisms in place for users to report such errors.  We currently have just under 20,000 such records, but now that we are shifting away from deep development, resources will shift to capturing more sales records (there are many thousands in the pipeline). I have yet to go through and enter all the verified Giulietta sales from this blog, but I will eventually get to it.

Please come check the site out and give us some feedback!  We will be launching full scale, with all features enabled in early April.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuvK1wVjFc0