Giulietta Ti: Italy’s Darling
While the “1900” marked Alfa’s first foray into series production, it’s the smaller Giulietta that transformed Alfa Romeo into Italy’s second-largest carmaker, overtaking a struggling Lancia.
Its development wasn’t trouble-free, though: the Giulietta saloon’s launch had to be delayed due to a resonance issue within the bodyshell whose root cause proved elusive.
Few people know that part of the Giulietta’s development was funded through a public subscription of capital, with the expressed commitment to put the new model on sale by 1954. To attract savers to the investment, a lottery to win a car was set up as well. This meant Alfa Romeo had to have a car on time for the Turin motor show in April of ’54, no matter what.
The Giulietta was a massively overspecified vehicle for its target market
Thankfully, the Austrian engineer Rudolf Hruska reasoned that sports car buyers would tolerate higher noise levels in the cabin and that Nuccio Bertone could deliver a sexy coupé in record time, and that’s how we got the fabulous Giulietta Sprint. The Sprint had gathered about 500 orders within the Turin show’s first day, thus buying Alfa’s engineers the…
