Well, that is a keeper. Thanks Richard.
John Brase
Indiana, USA
On 7/16/2011 12:02 PM, Richard C. Wagner wrote:
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.
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