A gallery of Geoff Gordon’s freshly built Alfasud Sprint Veloce, from the Garagista section of the March issue of the magazine. For the finished article, pick up a copy of the April issue, out soon…

It’s hard to describe the feeling when a ‘new’ racing car fires up for the first time – I know it’s a 1979 model, but it feels new to me. In this instance it was definitely an early Christmas present. After its engine had been fitted and checked over briefly at Raceworks Motorsport, builder Dave Ashford took the Alfasud Sprint Veloce to Brunswick Racing’s own premises near Ely for a much more exhaustive series of checks.

I was there on the first day it ran properly – and it sounded absolutely fantastic, as any racing Alfa should. The tests seemed to go well and I could tell from Dave’s reaction that he was very pleased.

We were all confident that he’d do a good job, given his track record with Alfas, but this was the first time he’d dry-sumped an engine of this kind. I guess there was a slight note of trepidation, but that was soon allayed. The four-pot delivers good, usable power between 5000 and 8200rpm, which is fairly typical of Dave. He also prepared my Giulietta’s engine and that has similar flexibility – which is always quite useful for the likes of me.

As a non-professional, I suspect I’m not alone in occasionally finding myself in the wrong gear, but the Giulietta allows you to pull through such problems and it looks as though the ’Sud is set to do the same. 

It ran faultlessly on the dyno for a couple of days, after which Dave hung onto the car for a short while to make a few tweaks to the dry sump and ensure that its ground clearance would be OK.

The ’Sud then went back to Raceworks and now has a full set of windows fitted – they’re all acrylic except for the front screen, which has been especially made with a heating element to avoid misting. With each passing day it started to look ever more like a complete racing car and eventually all that remained was to apply the graphics to put the finishing touches to its red-and-white racing livery…

Do you have a car that should be in the Garagista section of the magazine? Email [email protected] your car and championship and we’ll be in touch.