The ugliest Alfa you've ever seen

In the February issue I ran a photo from the 1972 Targa Florio showing a weird-looking little Italian sports-prototype which I thought was probably the world-famous Giliberti A112. Various correspondents have since corrected me (crikey, some people actually read this stuff?), so the fact that we had long ago filed the print only under ‘P’ for photograph came back to bite us in the rear. What the shot actually captured was perhaps the worst case of automotive desecration for many years.

Or at least, that’s one way of looking at it, because removing the original hand-built body from a very pretty classic and replacing it with some beaten-out flat aluminium sheet to continue racing would in period have been entirely defensible.

The car in question was actually the Alfa Romeo TZ-based ‘Tiger’ campaigned in the 1972 Targa Florio by Carmelo Giugno and Salvatore Sutera. Their little car didn’t survive to the finish, having possibly succumbed to terminal embarrassment, but at least they’d made the effort to strip out and lighten their contender, and to run it in the up-to-1600cc sports class of an FIA World Championship round. So full marks for effort, if not for aesthetic taste.

Which Alfa TZ was it that had been Tigered in this way? The chassis serial ‘750009’ has been suggested, this having apparently been Giugno’s TZ as raced and hillclimbed widely by him since as early as 1965-66. Needs must when such an elderly standard Gran Turismo could not secure an entry…