What’s the most Alfa Romeo car in the back catalogue?

Alfa Romeo 158/159 Alfetta / 1938–1951

There are so many eras of Alfa Romeo to choose from, for good and bad, but there’s one iconic car that practically invented the lore and helped give rise to the racing cliche of ‘win on Sunday, sell on Monday’ – the 158/159 Alfetta.

It’s one of the most successful racing cars ever made, winning 38 of the 42 Grands Prix it entered and countless more non-championship events. It was driven by some of the greats – Juan Manuel Fangio, Giuseppe Farina, Luigi Fagioli. People complain in modern racing when teams get too dominant, but Alfa Romeo was the first to do it properly.

The Alfetta was high-tech at the time, but the parts list brings a tear to your eye these days. It had a tubular frame chassis and leaf spring suspension, no aero sophistry to speak of and the engine was mounted up front between two solid looking, uncompromising treaded tyres. Hell, it didn’t even come with a seatbelt, because back in those days men were men. Until they crashed, then they were done for.

The 1.5-litre straight-eight supercharged engine was designed by Gioachino Colombo, who did such a nice job in 1937 that then Alfa race team boss Enzo Ferrari later nabbed him for a little road car project he was planning to launch in 1947. Indeed, the Colombo V12 was still being built in 1988. Gioachino returned to Alfa Romeo in time to work on the Alfetta once again and ensure championship success in the opening seasons of the F1 championship. By the time the 159 was created for the 1951 season, it weighed 710kg and produced 425bhp (a significant increase from 195bhp in 1938, thanks to the Roots single stage compressor being upgraded to a two-stage system). It was enough to get the car to a top speed of 190mph, if you were brave enough.

By the time of 1950’s inaugural F1 season, the Alfa team was seasoned and practiced. Its driver line-up certainly was too – Fangio (39), Farina (44) and Fagioli (52) were wily old foxes, keen to outrace the challenging Ferraris. It wasn’t a walkover – turning up the power on the engines meant having to carry outrageous amounts of fuel, seriously taxing the swing axle suspension, which was replaced with a De Dion set-up that still didn’t quite address the weaknesses. Still, the Alfa won every race that it contested in 1950 and Farina took the first F1 drivers’ title. The upgrade to the stiffer 159 pushed Alfa Romeo to a second title in 1951, Fangio’s first.

Alfa left F1 at the end of the 1951 season, only to pop back up again in 2018 as a ‘technical partner’ to the Sauber team and getting the naming rights as title sponsor from 2019. The marketing fluff hasn’t quite captured the magic of the Forties and Fifties, and Sauber will become the Audi factory team in 2026. Not the first time an Alfa has been chopped in for a premium German brand, but look back far enough and you’ll find a time when it wasn’t like that at all.