Aug 2006

An Alfa Romeo Legend

From the early 1950s to the 1980s the name of Carlo Chiti has been associated with some of the greatest cars to bear the famous name of Alfa Romeo. He graduated in Engineering from the Florence University & began to work for Alfa in 1953. Working in the Racing Department, Chiti was involved in developing the Giulietta Sprint for the GT championship. Obviously a rare talent, he was poached by Ferrari in 1957 to become the Scuderia’s Technical Director. He was immediately plunged into the ultra competitive world of Formula One and Sports Car racing, forced to learn very quickly how to deal with designers, drivers and the infernal politics of the Ferrari bureaucracy.

Chiti oversaw the development of the Ferrari 246 F1 car with which Mike Hawthorn won the 1958 World Championship and the 156 which Phil Hill used to win the 1961 F1 World Championship. After an unfortunate row with Ferrari, Chiti left to design the ill-fated ATS Formula One car in 1962. After a year of frustration, he quit and formed the firm of Autodelta in partnership with Ludovico Chizzola. A major contract they won was to develop the new GTZ coupe for Alfa Romeo. This involved building 100 cars for homologation to the design of Zagato. The success of this car in GT championship racing led Alfa Romeo to buy out Chiti and Chizzola and bring Autodelta under the wing of the Milanese company.

The TZ and TZ2 designs had many 2 litre class wins as did the Giulia Super and GTA coupe in Touring Car racing in the sixties. However, when the TZ2 was getting towards the end of its competitive life, Alfa Romeo decided that Chiti and the Autodelta design staff should build a brand new rear engined sports car to compete in the 2 litre class of the world championship. In 1967 the Tipo 33 was born. It had a 90 degree V8 2 valve per cylinder engine initially and had many class wins in that form. In 1969 the engine was enlarged to 3 litres and the 33/2 became a coupe. The first outright victory came in the Brands Hatch 1000 Km race of 1971, to be followed by victories in the Targa Florio (with drivers Nino Vaccarella and Toine Hezemans) and in the Watkins Glen 6 Hour in the same year (drivers Andrea de Adamich & Ronnie Peterson).

Carlo Chiti was becoming a distinctive figure at circuits all around the world. He was tall, bald and had a round face and body and always wore thick-rimmed spectacles and indulged in much Italian-style gesticulation. Porsches were the toughest opposition in the seventies and Alfa took until 1975 to beat them for the World Championship of Constructors. This all-conquering car was the 33 TT12 which had a 12 cylinder boxer engine with four overhead cams producing 500bhp.

After winning the World Championship again in 1977, the Alfa Romeo board of directors decided to drop Sports Car racing and told Autodelta to concentrate on Formula One. They had some success in 1978 when Bernie Ecclestone’s Brabham team won two Grands Prix with Alfa engines – the Swedish & Italian Grands Prix, both won by Niki Lauda.

For the 1979 season Autodelta produced for Alfa their own Formula One car. This was the first complete Alfa Romeo to compete in the World Championship since the mighty Alfettas of 1951. Success, however, didn’t come so easily. Many near misses and a couple of second places was the result. Six years of frustration ended in 1985 when the board decided to pull the pin. In fact the last Grand Prix that featured an Alfa Romeo car was the first Grand Prix to be contested in Australia, the 1985 Adelaide race.

Carlo Chiti had had enough by then and he resigned in 1985. He went on to design another Grand Prix engine for Motori Moderni and it was used in the first Minardis.

Chiti’s time with Alfa Romeo saw some wonderful cars produced and raced (as well as some disappointments) but his contribution to the history of this great marque is truly legendary. Perhaps the most fondly remembered models produced under his stewardship were the GTZ coupes and the Tipo 33 sports racers.