Wild thing
Perhaps it was one of the few mistakes made by Carlo Chiti, the charismatic head of Autodelta, Alfa Romeo’s racing division. Alfa Romeo had dominated the 1.6-litre class with the TZ, and its successor, the T33, was now set to move up a class with its 2-litre eight-cylinder engine. The first versions were fast in 1967, but they were also unreliable and therefore had no chance of success. Why the new racing car for 1968, the T33/2, was not designed with a three-litre engine from the outset remains a mystery, because then it could have competed for overall victories. In the first important race of 1968, the 24 Hours of Daytona, Autodelta sent three T33/2s with 2-litre engines to the USA. They ran without any problems and finished in 5th, 6th and 7th place – ahead of them were three Porsche 907s, which, with their 2.2-litre displacement, did not take full advantage of the new regulations that allowed prototypes with up to 3 litres of displacement. However, in Italy, people were apparently so happy with the result that they subsequently referred to these T33/2s as ‘Daytona’.
As early as the winter of 1967/68, experiments were carried out with a 2.5-litre version of the eight-cylinder engine, surprisingly in Australia, where the engine was used in a Brabham in the Tasman Series. At the Targa Florio in May 1968, local hero Nico Vaccarella was given the first T33/2 with the 2.5-litre engine – it is said to have been the very same car, #75033015, that had already been driven to sixth place in Daytona by Andretti/Bianchi. Vaccarella drove the Targa to second place in the first two laps, then handed over to Udo Schütz, who promptly crashed the Alfa into a wall. Two weeks later, however, Schütz/Bianchi finished seventh in this car in the 1000 km race at the Nürburgring.
In the summer of 1968, the VDS team of Belgian Count Rudi van der Straten, heir to the Stella Artois brewery, took over the Alfa Romeo. There were no major successes, and in 1970 #75033015 went to Portuguese driver Antonio Peixinho, who then shipped the T33/2 to Angola. He won several races, then sold the Alfa to Santos Peras, who won one last race in 1974. The car then came into the hands of Antonio de Santos, who also owned a Ford Gt40 and a Chevron B19, but had to leave Angola very suddenly during the political turmoil, leaving his cars behind. In the mid-1980s, a Frenchman discovered the vehicles and brought the Alfa to Europe under adventurous conditions, where it was restored in the 1990s by former Autodelta mechanic Marcello Gambi. A long career in historic racing followed, and since 2012, #75033015 has been part of the Quadrifoglio Collection, which will be auctioned by RM Sotheby’s in Monterey in August 2025. This T33/2, which apparently still has the original 2.5-litre V8, the first ever, is expected to fetch between 1.7 and 2 million dollars.
We also have a small collection of other Tipo 33/2 and 33/3 models. But above all, we have a test drive report – radical actually had the pleasure of driving one of these ‘Daytonas’ once before, here. And then there’s the archive.
Be First to Comment