Nicely put Rich. My only disagreement is that soul isn't always high performance. Thus, some trucks have soul. So does my Harley.
Ciao, Ben -----Original Message----- From: Richard C. Wagner [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Saturday, July 16, 2011 11:03 AM To: The Baylys; 'Alfa Digest' Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: [alfa] Re: Is this an Alfa? Beetle wrote: > So is it the engine or the bodywork that is the deciding factor? Many > Alfas have been nothing more than an Alfa engine in someone else's > bodywprk, both > by design and manufacture. Does this relegate Alfa to being merely a > powerplant supplier? This dovetails nicely with Ben's comment: > So, do the Alfa badges make it an Alfa? And I think what I'm saying is that it's the *spirit* and *soul* that makes a car an Alfa. Alfas have possessed a recognizable soul since the early days. I don't know if any of us could quantify it or even fully qualify it, but when presented with a car, we might look at it and say, "That's an Alfa." We might even look at a car and say, "That's done just like an Alfa. If I didn't know better, I would have thought that IS an Alfa." I think, surely, the heart of any Alfa is its engine. I've done engine design for a living. I've developed one of the only software engine design packages available. And every Alfa engine design I've seen, including the flat-fours, including the V-6s, is beautiful. The designs are well thought out, with creative and elegant solutions to many of the problems that are encountered when designing such a mechanism. (Ever look at the Alfa V-6? It isn't a V-6. It's a staggered straight-six. It has balanced dynamics and an even firing gap. That's why it sounds like a straight-six, and doesn't have that funny warble that other V-6s have.) By contrast, the Chrysler V-10 is a clumsy, inelegant design. It's unbalanced in its base state, and can only be balanced using active balancers that consume power. It has a massive valve gear that can only work up to a rather low rpm, and so it can only generate significant power with huge displacement. None of that is found in Alfa's designs. The V-10 is unworthy of bearing the Alfa name. I think you can find the same kind of soul in Alfa's suspension designs. Again, you see the smart, elegant solutions that are found in the engines. Alfa's original rear end designs could easily be considered pedestrian by many. But their light weight and lateral fixing made them high performance designs to be sure. Even with a solid rear axle, nothing handles like and Alfa. When Alfa decided to make a new suspension design, for the Alfetta, they used a super low mass torsion bar setup for the front, and a De Dion design for the rear that combines the best aspects of solid axle and independent suspension together in one package. There is a definite soul in Alfa's suspension designs, too. You see this same kind of soul in other marques. I worked my way through high school and college as a Honda motorcycle mechanic. The Honda engine designs up through about 1984 had a definite soul to them. All of us who worked on them recognized it. And we all agreed that it disappeared around 1984, to be replaced by a different style and different thinking. There is an intangible *something* that makes an Alfa an Alfa. And I would argue that it's neither the badge nor the bodywork. Rich Wagner Montrose, CO Mojave, CA Tehachapi, CA And points elsewhere... '82 GTV6 -- to be removed from alfa, see http://www.digest.net/bin/digest-subs.cgi or email "unsubscribe alfa" to [email protected]
