In the depth of a miserable and wet British winter in 1991, I took a train from Leeds to Birmingham to attend a car show. It wasn’t the irregular but somehow still quite glamorous British motor show, but some low-rent motorsports related thing.
Thankful that British rail managed to overcome fallen leaves on the rails on this particular trip, I made it to the National Exhibition Centre all excited to see the two mind-blowing creations that were on display. First order of the day was to take a glimpse at the impossibly long and elegant Jaguar XJ220 and, perhaps more importantly, take a close look at the Alfa Romeo SZ.
The XJ220 is not difficult to understand. It is a story of great charm and beauty, a tale of wind cheating and sculpting of metal into a shape so sensuous that no schoolboy could resist but to sketch it at the back of his math notebook.
The Alfa Romeo is a completely perplexing motorcar. I thought it must have required Herculean effort to come up with a shape so horrifying that it looks disfigured, as if the car factory was hit by a thalidomide bomb and when the babies came out, the doctors cried.
I was sure that Alfistis everywhere cried when they first saw the SZ. It was difficult to suppress the gag reflex, I can tell you.
The car came out in 1989 and when I first saw the pictures, the first thing that came to mind was a Hyena with bare fangs, but this one had eight eyes like a spider. It actually made my skin crawl. And still does. Ugh.
It was the combination of six small and beady headlamps, together with the turn indicators that gave it that creepy arachnid character.
The hunched back and short stunted body with the small tyres reminds me of hyenas, which always looked, to me, like rabid wild dogs, born with spinal deformity and limbs that are too small. Thalidomide again.
I wanted to know for sure if Zagato had made a huge mistake. As it turned out, the car only bore the Z of Zagato and maybe some small details but the overall stance and shape was the work of French designer Robert Opron, who was then working for Fiat Cento Stile.
Opron must have sketched it in the dark while trying to run away from giant, hairy black widows.
Zagato must have been quite desperate at the time, to allow such an abomination to bear their name.
To be fair, Zagato’s history is peppered with some questionable looking cars, but their awkwardness is mostly in the detailing, while keeping some semblance of elegant proportions.
The SZ is ugly in detailing and hideous in proportions. Even the tyres are too small for the ungainly slab sides.
To add insult to injury, the body was made with some glass fibre reinforced plastic or some such lightweight material that Alfa Romeo and Fiat thought would best represent the car’s motorsports heritage.
While the insult is still biting, someone decided to rub in some salt into the wound by asking fifth graders to actually make the plastic bodies and they achieved the accuracy that would have given them a C-, at best for their arts and crafts project.
The panel gaps on the car looked appalling in pictures and they were positively ghastly in real life, it is as if a spastic sculptor had trimmed the doors, bonnet, side panels and even the boot.
Thanks to the slab sides and oversized wheel arch, the wheels and tyres looked out of place and from some angles, they even looked like they are not in proper alignment with the rest of the body.
There is no way I can insult this car’s appearance, not even if I tried really hard. I say this because I was not able to recapture the feeling of disgust of seeing the car in real life as I write these paragraphs. It really is ugly.
Why it needed to be so ugly remains an unsolved mystery. It is a crime that is lacking in believable motive, especially coming from a company that is loved for its many beautiful creations.
What is even more confusing, is that they had endowed this car with capabilities that would make it the envy of the rest of the motoring world.
Based on the chassis of an Alfa Romeo 75 group A IMSA race car, it had the underpinnings of a motoring legend and one of the commandments of the SZ was that it could pull lateral Gs more than its own weight.
Alfa Romeo, which is known for producing cars with formidable cornering prowess, claimed maximum cornering force of 1.1G but some independent testers clocked 1.4 times the force of gravity.
You’d need a good neck brace if you wanted to push this car.
Under the bonnet is gorgeous 3-litre V6, which has earned its place in engine Valhalla and in keeping with Alfa Romeo traditions of the time, they combined the gearbox with differential and fed power to it through a torque tube and from there, a pair of half shafts to the wheel.
The rear wheels were located by a de-Dion axle and Watts parallelogram linkage, also extracted from Alfa Romeo’s motorsports division.
They paid very little attention to practicality what with window lines that tapered severely upwards towards the rear restricting vision all around, except to the front.
The fancy de-Dion axle and watts linkage stood tall and meant there was no boot space. In fact, the boot opening was so small, one could confuse it for a suitcase that was once the car’s embryonic twin but has not been partially absorbed by the dominant foetus.
There was just about enough room for a spare tyre, and, if I’m not mistaken, it was for the thinner front ones. Or were they space savers?
This is a car that we must learn to appreciate because it embodies Voltaire’s urge to us to defend that which we find disagreeable because it is precisely that which defines the very idea of freedom of expression.
Thank you Alfa Romeo for creating a car so spectacularly wrong that we will always remember.