automotive car motor daily: 1972 Alfa Romeo Montreal Classic Drive

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Aside from Abraham

1972 Alfa Romeo Montreal Front Right Side View

Almost killing Isaac, the part of the Old Testament that's always bothered me the most is Moses never making it to the Promised Land. Really? After all he did and all he went through, the poor guy doesn't even get to step foot into the land of Milk and Honey? Nope. Moses angered God, and God wouldn't allow him in. And that just seems so very unfair. I mention this because the Bertone-designed Alfa Romeo Montreal was never available for purchase in its namesake city, Montreal. Nor anywhere in Canada, and it never went on sale in the U.S., either. Blame that fact on changing emissions and safety laws, labor struggles, and just a general shortsightedness on Alfa Romeo's part. That's not to say Alfa sold many of them elsewhere, as the Montreal had a total production run of just 3917 units. There are currently about 100 of these nearly forgotten Alfa sports cars here in the States, with only around a dozen or so in California. This red babe you see here happens to be one of them. Thank, um, God. In 1967, Alfa Romeo brought a sexy personal luxury-style coupe to the Montreal Expo. It had no name -- really it was just an Alfa concept that was supposed to represent "Man's Highest Aspiration in the Automotive Field" -- and the frame and suspension bits were identical to other more common Alfas, like the Giulia or GTV. But the show car did have an ace up its sleeve. A young man at Bertone named Marcello Gandini designed it. The car cognoscenti among you are no doubt aware that Mr. Gandini subsequently designed wedgy masterpieces like the Lamborghini Countach and Lancia Stratos. However, those two showed up in the 1970s. The design that really put Gandini on the map is the drop-dead-gorgeous 1966 Lamborghini Miura, a car that to some is the be-all and end-all of good-looking. Now, take a long, hard look at the Montreal, and you can see more than a bit of Miura in the front-engine Alfa's line, especially from the hard side, where the vents on the B-pi llars plus the overall shape of the greenhouse, loudly announce that the two Italians are in fact pretty close relatives, despite the Lambo being mid-engined. Also worth noting are the moveable eyelashes over the Montreal's headlights, which are similar in style at least to the Miura's black lashes. Funny little fact: The only place on the entire car where the word Montreal appears is on the ashtray cover. How amazingly cool is that? While there is no doubt that the Montreal is a Gandini design, the longer you look, the more you realize just how unique it is, though of course the rear end does look like a mash-up of a Datsun 240Z and a Saab Sonnet III. Going with that, the Montreal is very much a product of its time. Alfa Romeo decided to display the production version of the Montreal at the 1970 Geneva show in March, alongside its obvious competition, the Citroen SM and the Mercedes-Benz R107 SL (and later the SLC). Alfa promised the car would be on sale by June of that same year. But labor unrest engulfed the Italian car industry, and both Alfa Romeo and Bertone went through eight months of strikes and tire fires. Finally, in the later half of 1971, the first Montreals began showing up in customers' driveways. However, by this point, it became very clear to Alfa that the rich and desirable U.S. market was slipping out of reach. Tighter emissions and crashworthiness laws meant tha t, as is, the Montreal would have to be reengineered. And it had just gone out the door in Europe. It's a sad story, and one we've heard a hundred times, but the unfortunate decision was made not to sell the Montreal in the U.S. or Canada, dooming it to small sales and obscurity. America was where the money was. Put another way, while in production for two fewer years, Citroen sold nearly 14,000 SMs on both continents, to Alfa's fewer than 4000 Montreals.

1972 Alfa Romeo Montreal Front Left View 2

Now comes the time when I get to drive it. "One guy almost broke it by shifting at 3000 rpm," owner Gene Brown says to me as I prepare to take the Alfa out onto Potrero Road in Hidden Valley, California. One of the very roads, as it happens, on which my father -- who hails from Montreal -- taught me to drive. But even though I know this particular ribbon of macadam quite intimately, Gene's warning has left me nervous. "Well, where should I shift?" I ask, scared that his response might limit me to plugging along at 40 mph. "Well, I just use my ears, but I guess 6000 rpm is about right." My face lights up in a smile. Oh, yes, yes, it is. I spend the next 20 minutes at wide-open throttle, running up and down through the Montreal's five-speed ZF gearbox. The synchro on 2 is a little wonky, but other than that almost meaningless hiccup, I'm in absolute automotive heaven -- the Italian part. "The thing that gets me about driving this car is the pain in my jaw," Brown says. "Becaus e I can't stop smiling." Part of Brown's chronic smiling problem is the sound the motor makes. We'll get to that, but why it makes such a sound is quite a story. A common misconception about the Montreal's 2.6-liter V-8 is that it's nothing more than two Alfa 1290cc I-4 DOHC engines V'd together and joined around a common crank. Wrong! The Montreal's motivator is in fact a detuned version of the V-8 found in the crazy-rare 33 Stradale and the Tipo 33 race car, with different heads and a different bore and stroke, taking the displacement from 2.0 to 2.6 liters. (Of course, there was a 2.5-liter V-8 in the Tipo 33/2 that's also related). The new stroke is a very short 65 mm, while the bore is 80. Contrast those measurements to the nearly "square" 75mm stroke and 74mm bore of the 1290cc engine, and you see that the Montreal's V-8 doesn't resemble your typical Alfa Romeo I-4. All that said, the valvetrain is very similar, and that's probably where some of the confusion comes from. The rest stems from just how very neatly 2.6 divides into 1.3 liters, plus the fact that Alfa just slapped two Giulia fuel pumps under the hood. While the engine has four cams like all other DOHC V-8s, they are four unique cams. Meaning you can't just phone up your friendly neighborhood Alfa fanatic and ask for any old Montreal camshaft, oh, no. You have to know specifically which one you need. Just to keep things complicated and expensive, the passenger exhaust cam drives the distributor; the passenger intake camshaft drives nothing; the driver intake cam drives the SPICA fuel-injection system; while the driver exhaust, like the other exhaust cam, drives nothing. Put another way, 3917 Montreals left the factory, and only 3917 of each camshaft also left the factory. I'm sure they made spares, but again, good luck tracking one down. The oil pan is magnesium, as are the cam covers. The exhaust valves are sodium-filled, and a dry sump handles all the oil. Like the upcoming 2013 Shelby GT500, the crankshaft's counter weights are made of tungsten. Even the distributor is odd: Instead of using a larg er distributor to handle eight plugs, or even a dual-distributor setup like the one in the fuel pumps, Alfa went ahead and packed two distributors into one. The rotor has a contact up top and another on the bottom, positioned diagonally from the one on top. There are four contact points on the top side of the distributor housing, and four on the bottom, offset from the upper quartet by 45 degrees.