Category: Sprint Speciale’s

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giuliettas dot com turns 100!

147 days ago I started this Giuliettas.com blog.  Why?  I guess there was no real central location for auction news (with selling price and pictures), historical musings and small personal mechanical struggles with Giuliettas.  No one-stop-shop if you will.  Now that I have been at it a while I have to ask myself: What have I done?  I’ve created a small, usually quiet readership who send me a nudge whenever a few days goes by and I haven’t put up a new post.  I appreciate the comments, no matter how brief or off topic and market alert emails (Paul and Ian come first to mind) they keep me going when I wonder what the point is and help a lot when I don’t have the time to search on my own for cars.  I thought this blog would just be a lunchtime meditiation to help me avoid all of the horrible Silicon Valley California fast food lunch invites and fill gaps between work projects.  It has done these and much more, I’ve even made some friends along the way. 

SS going fast in the dirt back when the world was a simpler place to live.

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Market #47: Restored Austrian Giulia SS

This 1964 Giulia SS is available here and here out of Austria.  I seem to remeber this car from somewhere else, but haven’t had time to go through my files to see.  No price is listed on Anamera and price is listed as inquire on the sellers website so it’s a safe bet they want top dollar for the car, maybe 50K Euro’s?

Very nice backdrop for a photo set.  Greens in the background really bring out the lustrous red body.  I don’t see anything wrong here.  That’s quite a billboard they put out front.

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Market #41: Giulietta SS 00207 cleaned up.

Another update: This car has reportedly sold!  I guess that means you have to buy mine…

Update: I found a couple of pictures from the previous sale if anyone is seriously interested in this car and wants to see them email me at sprints@giuliettas.com. Also this car is missing the hood spear but they are available.

Giulietta SS 10120*00207, Engine 00536*08350, Bertone *87*209*. Fantasy Junction has this car listed for $48,500. This car was sold by them last year for about $28,000 as a project. Interestingly the link on their ‘Cars we sold’ page is gone. I suppose if I was selling this car a second time after it under went a cosmetic face lift I’d rather the world didn’t know.

The engine in the car is a 1600cc from a 1966 Giulia Sprint GT Veloce or a Duetto and contemporary literature lists the power output at either 125 or 122 depending on the brochure, either way a few shy of the 129hp claimed for a 10121 Giulia SS. The good: Probably a fast smooth 10120 Giulietta SS, not as high strung as one with the original 100 hp 1300cc engine but the bad: it’s not original and the price doesn’t adequately reflect this in my opinion, though I suppose it could be argued that it’s close. I could of course go on at length with opinions but form your own from this: The correct 00120 Engine with all the the correct parts in running condition starts at $15,000 due to its commonality with the expensive SZ, a 1966 Veloce engine like the one in this car is maybe $5-6000.

Car looks a lot better than it did when I looked at it last year. All of the loose ends seem to have been tied up. I like the addition of fog lights. Headlights are cheapo Wagners or something. I’d like to see some period Carello’s or Marchal’s but if you’re sprucing a car up to make money it probably doesn’t make sense to spend money unnecessarily, especially when so few would notice.

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Market #36: Very Rough 1600 SS

Update: This car (11/18/08) is now offered for 1012 Euro.  Next thing you know this car will be free if you are willing to get a tetanus shot and show up with a trailer.  I know of a similar car locally that, in addition to being this rusty, was hit HARD in the front, that recently changed hands for the price of a tow.  Someday for this car?  I hope so…

The opening bid of $5413.80 (3500 Euro) will probably buy you this challenging SS rusty shell project that is currently on Italian eBay. Of course what do you do with something like this? From the pictures, I’d say half of the car would have to be rebuilt from panel sections and fabricated from scratch. Lets not forget glass… doors… trim…

This is kind of what I expected to arrive when my SS came, but I spent less than this and got more than I was hoping of the trim and glass. Drivers side headlight opening is funky among other things. Steering box should be present, a small plus.

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Market #27: Austrian Giulia SS project

Looking to out do me and have an even worse SS starting point? Look no further. 10,000 Euros ‘Buy it now’ and this could be yours. Based on the pictures it is a 10121*38XXXX, Giulia SS. Seemingly clean SS’s tend to hide rust very well, not so this car, it is clearly out of the closet.
When I and the internet were young I used to play a game where I used translation software to translate phrases back and forth from English to other languages. The results were often startlingly funny. Obviously translation software hasn’t improved much. The translated eBay text reads: “For sale is a rare Alfa Romeo Giulia SS, 1.6 petrol, with original Italian papers, restaurations object, partially disassembled and prepared to restore! Rollfähig vehicle engines and gearboxes are expanded, Interior Rooms with almost complete. Foreign facilities without Stosstangen and without barbecue. Inquiries under 0043 676 6500 954 Enjoy bidding 3, 2, 1, deins …… NO and NO GUARANTEE WARRANTY” Phew, I was worried about the barbecue…
Car doesn’t actually look too bad in this picture. Headlight openings, grill opening, hood alignment and all look right, bumper mounts are sticking out into space. I like the blue lower lip paint scheme, like a 4 year old after a blue popsicle.

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Market #18: Stunning silver Giulietta Sprint Speciale

This 1961 Giulietta Sprint Speciale is listed for sale on several European classic car classified websites and is described as having been restored in Denmark in about 1989 and currently licensed there. Asking price is 36,000 Euro’s, about $55,000 at the time of writing. If this car is as good as it looks this is probably a good deal, but from California, the requisite journey to inspect the car and then the shipping to get it home would add as much as $10,000 to the purchase price.

Restored SS’s are seldom seen in silver. Most of these cars seem to get returned to their original color and I don’t think silver was on the stock palette, though with Alfa you could probably call them up and get whatever you wanted for a price. Chrome bright-work up front blends in and is almost lost in the beautifully finished paint. This is the effect I enjoy so much on the 007 DB5 Aston. It doesn’t scream ‘look at me’ like a shiny red car with a chrome grill, it doesn’t have to. You can’t help but look.

Very classy looking car from this angle. Bodywork is arrow straight and fussy, hard to make right front trim all fits together perfectly.

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Market #5: Giulietta SS Low-nose 00014

Giulietta Sprint Speciale 10120-00014, Engine 00120-00024. Available from Heinbrand for 54,000 Euros, about $75,000 when written. This car has 750SS on its build plaque, I’m not sure yet what that means but looking carefully at the engine compartment picture a 750 series Veloce head can clearly be seen along with the separate water-pipe style intake manifold and the headers don’t appear to be the standard SS tubular style. In the picture showing the build plaque a Weber 40DCO3 is barely visible. I’m not sure if the bodywork is supposed to be aluminum but it is described as ‘der ursprünglichsten Version’ in the brief ad copy, which I think means it is a lightweight version, perhaps having aluminum hood, trunk, doors and maybe other parts. Alfa was never one to worry about standardization among its special cars such as the Veloce’s and Speciale’s, so it’s no surprise to me that despite reading claims that all SS’s are based on 101 components here sits essentially a 750 Sprint Veloce Speciale.

Note the driving lamp bar mounting holes in the nose and black stripe. There also seem to be holes in the roof above the windshield.

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Market #4: Giulietta SS Low-nose 00001

An early low-nose SS doesn’t come on the market often and I get to feature two in quick succession. In the world of hand-made aluminum bodied Italian cars of the 1950’s there are many whose performance and reliability don’t live up to the promise of the sleek, beautiful body. Not so the SS. The argument could probably be made that without their comparatively plentiful ancestors, the steel bodied Giulietta and Giulia SS’s that regularly change hands, these early cars would be as expensive or more-so than their cousins the SZ and TZ. If Ferrari made a twin cam 4 cylinder car in the 1950’s and it looked and performed like this, it would be half a million dollars or more. What does all this speculation mean for these cars? Undervaluation? Real world use? Who knows for sure, but if the surge in pricing of SS’s over the last few years is any indication, now is the time to buy one of these jewels if you can.

Giulietta Sprint Speciale 10120-00001, Engine 00120-00003. Owned more than 20 years by a ‘prominent collector’ in Southern California, this car is the top of the market. Only an SS with serious race provenance might be worth more, but there are only perhaps 3 such cars and none has changed hands that I’ve heard about. Seller claims this car was retained by Alfa Romeo for several years after being built, finally sold to a private individual in 1960. If this car is in ‘as-built’ condition, any flaws are irrelevant, but no indication is made in the ad copy to this effect. I suspect it has seen some ‘up-grading’ over the years.

Not so otherworldly as the later cars with their prominent edges and busy bright-work, the SS above, number one of a line that stretched 8 years and about 2500 examples, is understated and elegant while purposefully aerodynamic and lightweight.

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Market #3: Giulietta SS vent window option car

Giulietta Sprint Speciale 10120-177061, engine 00120-01476. Available for 44,500 Euro’s (close to $70K at date of writing) from www.marreyt-classics.com in January 2008, but now listed as sold. Intrigued by the vent windows on the car, and wanting to see the condition it took to ask this kind of money for an SS, I sent them an inquiry. They replied with a group of low-to-medium resolution pictures stating the car was restored in Belgium by a restoration shop owner for his son. The car has seen little use other than as store-front eye-candy since it was completed. Greig Smith, multiple Giulietta owner, Alfa historian and all around nice guy from South Africa assures me the vent windows were an option available on special order from the factory. The small driving lights busy up the front a bit, but in a good way in my opinion, though I doubt this car will ever be driven in the kind of weather that requires extra lighting.

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