1982 GTV6 Balocco

 

After my Alfa hiatus, the big struck me again after I dusted off my Spider.  Everybody knows that ALFA stands for Always Looking For Another, so it wasn’t long before I went off in search of something.

 

My original intent was a Milano, something I could drive year round, however when I picked up the national newsletter to go poking through the ads, in that particular month there were no Milanos for sale.  Only a few GTV6’s, and one in particular caught my attention.  Low miles, no rust, Florida car, reasonable price.

 

I called, and things got interesting.

 

As a tiny bit of background, you need to know that early Alfa V6’s had a few well known problem areas.  They blew head gaskets around 30k miles.  The water pumps went every 30k miles.  The timing belt (routine maintenance) needed to be replaced, you guessed it, every 30k miles.  The timing belt tensioner fell apart, well, every 30k miles.

 

Now, anybody who knows anything about Alfa V6’s knows that every 30k miles, when you change the timing belt, you replace the water pump and belt tensioner at the same time.  The head gaskets only need to be done once, there are updated head gaskets and once you have them, leaking head gaskets are no longer a problem.

 

Well, this poor guy was going upscale from Fiats to Alfas.  This was his first.  He bought it with 27k miles on it.  It now had 31k miles on it.  In those 4k miles, he replaces one head gasket when it blew.  Then the other.  Then it needed a water pump.  Then the timing belt tensioner went.  One by one they went, and one by one he replaced them.

 

Now, had he known, he would have done them all at once, only eaten the labor of taking apart the front of the motor once, and been done with it.  Instead, after 4k miles he was completely exasperated.

 

After finding all this out, I felt obliged to tell him that he had just finished replacing everything that was going to break on that car for the next 30k miles, and at that point all he really needed to do was a slightly extended timing belt replacement (add the water pump and belt tensioner).  He didn’t want to hear it, the car was a piece of crap, please, please come and take it off his hands.

 

No problem.  I’ll be right down.

 

Now, the car was in Florida, and you can’t really go to Florida without dragging along nagging wife and screaming children for a trip to Disney world.  Which I did.

 

The plan was to fly into Orlando, leave them there, take a bus an hour east (the car was on the east coast), drive back, enjoy the week, stick them on a plane, and drive home alone.  A cramped 2+2 is no place for four people plus luggage.

 

About 20 miles out of Melbourne, the speedo stopped working.  The seller had told me it was intermittent (another common problem – the speedo sender get’s wet and stops working), so I wasn’t surprised, except that it never came back.  Why this is important is because ’82 was one of two years in which Alfa put really tall final drive ratios in GTV6’s, which I didn’t know at the time..

 

Got to Orlando, had a great week of theme park hell, and left a day early to try to stay ahead of a hurricane that was heading up the coast.  Did I mention that the wife and kids decided they wanted to go along for the ride?

 

Well, every Alfa I’ve ever owned did 70 mph when the tach read 3500 rpm, and there was no reason for this one to be different.  We took off heading north, keeping things between 3500 and 4000 rpm, 70 – 80 mph, however I was flying by the other drivers.  I figured it was just all the old folks that had retired in Florida.  And Georgia.  And South Carolina.  And North Carolina.  And…

 

I had intended to calibrate the tach against the mile markers to figure out how fast I was really going, but with the heavy rain I stayed focused on driving.

 

The wife kept telling me to speed up.

 

We stopped in the DC area for the night, and set off again the next morning.  The weather had cleared, and I found out how fast I had been going.

 

Turns out I had been doing ~100 mph or so for most of the previous day!

 

I opened my mouth to inform the wife of why the ride from Orlando to DC had passed so quickly, and at that moment she told me to speed up!

 

With a grin, I shut up and sped up.  What more could an Alfa nut ask for but a drive at 100 mph with the wife telling him to go faster?

 

Around Connecticut I had to slow down, staties there are famous for speed limit enforcement.  At that point I had to confess, or try to rationalize why we were now driving at what she would have calculated to be 50 mph.

 

Anyhow, as expected, I drove 30k trouble free miles, did the timing belt, water pump, and tensioner at 60k miles, and have now gone to 72k miles without any trouble whatsoever.  I actually called the guy I bought it from after I had it for a year to let him know how well it was running, he didn’t care.

 

Again, as with any decent Italian car, it must get flogged on the race track on occasion.  Here’s some shots at Lime Rock, taken in April 2000:

 

 

Just passed a TZ1 – NOT!

 

 

 

Little rear wheel lock.

 

 

 

Lotta wheel lock..

 

 

 

Just passed a GT1 Porsche, and a Ferrari – NOT!

 

 

 

Smooth as silk!

 

I started life with this car, and it kind of ended in Florida.  I brought it back there for the 2003 National convention, and on the way back it was in an accident, which ultimately resulted in my selling the car to a friend.  Pictures of that can be found <here>.