Scarabeo: The Weird, Secret Alfa Romeo Project You’ve Never Heard Of
Scarabeo is the Italian word for “beetle,” but for a few knowledgeable Alfa Romeo fans, it is also the name of one of the most tantalizing “might have been” chapters in the Marque’s long history.
Our story begins in February of 1966, less than a month after Alfa’s experimental department had begrudgingly surrendered the development of the 33 sports prototype to Autodelta, the racing department of Alfa Romeo headed by Carlo Chiti.
But the Portello’s proud engineers, headed by the great Orazio Satta, had racing in their blood and weren’t at all happy to leave all racing cars development to Chiti’s outfit, even if that’s precisely how Alfa Romeo’s president Giuseppe Luraghi wanted things to go.
“Losing” the 33 proved a particularly bitter pill to swallow for its creator Giuseppe Busso, who began working on a new racing car project in the hope that, by sticking within an inferior category and with a significantly cheaper car, he may keep this new program from going off to Autodelta.
Similarly to what happened with the 33 sports prototype, the new project received a type “105” code (105.56, to be precise) even though it very…
