Cars and coffee make for a common pairing, but we aren’t talking about a rushed cup grabbed at the gas station that’s slugged down on autopilot as you sit in traffic with the commuting masses on Monday morning. The parking lot car shows that have taken on the Cars & Coffee name are a better way to enjoy the two, but this is a different story altogether. This is one of those perfect mornings when a quality roast is followed by an equally caffeinated drive away from the gridlock of silver and beige, in a car that could easily pass for the automotive manifestation of espresso. Find an empty street, add a hot-rodded Alfa Romeo GTV, and try not to have the time of your life.
It would be impossible not to, but living in Los Angeles makes the first proposition a bit tricky; it’s rare to find a street in this city that isn’t lined with parked cars (whether their owners are trying to park them or trying to drive them), but if you can haul yourself out of bed early enough to beat the throngs of other motorists doing decidedly less fun things than power-sliding a souped-up sports car, there are plenty of these places to choose from.
This morning we’re joining Andrew Poole and his 1973 GTV 2000 for one such jaunt, but it’s a little misleading to stop there with the car’s description. The keen Alfisti eyes among us will have already noticed the discrepancy between the year and the car’s appearance, but the backdate to the 1969 bodywork is just one element that’s seen some revision on this feisty Italian coupe—almost everything on the car has been swapped out for something a bit more. A half cage splits up an interior that’s received a good flocking after its diet (there are no rear seats, for starters), earlier flying buttress-style seats were added behind the new MOMO Prototipo, but the real good stuff is where it always is: under the hood.
Lifting it reveals what at first glance looks like a standard Alfa inline-four two-liter, but it’s been fully rebuilt and honed to match the car’s performance with its club racer appearance. The head was ported and polished, the valves were enlarged, cams were upgraded to L8 units, high-compression pistons were sourced from Borgo to up the ratio to 10.4:1, new Weber 45s with trumpets were added on the intake side while stainless steel headers sit on the opposite side, along with a supporting mod list that would run on much too long for this space.
People like to say that all cars are meant to be driven, not stored in museums or locked away in garages. That’s a pretty close-minded and in many cases illogical idea to hold as universal, but in the case of a car like this one it couldn’t ring truer. It was literally built for this kind of early-AM hooning, and when you have a car begging to be thrashed, why not oblige it?
Drive Tastefully®
