photos courtesy: The Rev's Institute
Miles Collier's painter spent a week with a 000 brush, filling every sandblasted pit on the nose of a 1964 Alfa Romeo Giulia TZ with masking agent, one pockmark at a time. Then the whole nose got sprayed, and blasted again to knock the masking agent back off, so the fresh paint came out carrying every scar the car earned racing. That's the kind of lengths Collier goes to in order to preserve the car's individuality.
That's the whole philosophy in one story. This TZ, chassis 750052, was one of four sent by Scuderia Sant'Ambroeus to the 1964 Sebring 12 Hours as Alfa's de facto factory team, three red, one white, all three red cars wearing mismatched nose paint nobody at Alfa ever explained. Collier's guess is front-end damage before the race, patched fast and patched ugly. Whatever it was, it's why the car in front of him is tomato soup red up front and proper Alfa Rosso everywhere else.
The white car burned that weekend, hit on the front straight with its tail lights out, nobody hurt. Two more retired. Collier's car, driven by Jim Kaser and Chuck Stoddard, took the 1600cc GT class. Revs Institute's own account of the race notes the car finished the full twelve hours on a maladjusted clutch that forced Kaser and Stoddard into crash-box shifting the entire time, with its only real competition in class coming from an Abarth-Porsche, Jim Clark in a Lotus Cortina, and a couple of Lotus Elans. As Kaser told it afterward, Collier says, "they wouldn't let us go any faster than the speeds that we were turning, even though we were capable of it and wanted to." Alfa wanted the class win in hand, not a gamble on more.
It went to a doctor, Paul Tenney, who raced it a season in SCCA, then rattled through owners until it landed with a West Coast vintage racer named Steve Patience, who kept it for years before Collier bought it when Patience moved to Rhode Island. It has never been restored. Most of the car has been repainted and fussed with, sure, but nobody has ever taken it apart and put it back together the way a full restoration does.
Collier's point is that a car leaves the factory as an archetype, "exactly according to spec, according to Hoyle, how it's supposed to be." Everything after that, the beatings and the good life alike, is what turns it into an individual. "It's not really that it's an archetypal TZ," he says. "It's that it is the Kaser Stoddard, Sebring, Tenney, Patience, Revs car." It still runs its factory center-lock wheels, the kind Alfa only fitted to cars headed for endurance racing, and its original aluminum scissor jack is still strapped in the back. Under the skin it's a 1570cc twin-cam four making 175 horsepower at 6,500rpm, riding an 86.8 inch wheelbase and weighing 1,650 pounds, light enough that period drivers could shift 4th to 5th at 110 mph without much drama.
This weekend at Lime Rock it cracked a fatigue split in one of the brass radiator tanks, the kind of failure a modern race prep checklist doesn't even think to look for on a car that's over 60 years old. Collier isn't precious about it. "It's an old lady, and you don't want to beat the dickens out of it anymore," he says. "You try and give it the best ride you can without being abusive." A vintage race car sitting under gallery lighting is perfectly safe, he says. It's also not what it's for. "Being alive in the world is not without risk," he says, "for you, for me, or even for an Alfa Romeo GTZ."
