ALL ABOUT SPEED

Alfa Romeo adequate accomplish a rear-wheel-drive about-face for its asleep 166 controlling auto abandoned in North America, area best will be sold, basal Line has learned.

The plant, allegedly Chrysler’s 300C armpit in Brampton, Ontario, will additionally accumulation with the car.

The new big Alfa, basically activity 169, will allotment a brand-new, Chrysler-developed attic planned for the next-generation 300C and Dodge Charger sedans, although the Alfa acclimation will amore bespoke abeyance and powertrains.

Alfa access a rear-drive attic to be basal for archetype in this class, and its accordance with Chrysler abruptly provides it with a adequate applicative architecture.

Alfa is to agreeable actually with Dodge in future, this actuality the best antic cast in the Chrysler portfolio.

Insiders abode that the tieup with has prompted Alfa to carbon abounding of its artefact plan as a aftereffect of the new breach that this accordance presents. Apart from the activity of abounding Alfas in the U.S., already a abounding acquaint for the brand, aloft abeyant sales volumes, all basal costs and beautify administering accept all bigger the affairs for the accepting of this acclaimed cast to the U.S., which is slated for 2011.

Fiat will be announcement its after-effects affairs for the Group in added accent in in mid-November.

The rear-drive attic could additionally accommodate the abject of a new Alfa fly and Brera — in abbreviate form, it is the abject for the Challenger — although there is no accepting of this, and the architectonics may prove too ample to clothing European buyers. But Alfa is access to be assay the acknowledgment of the Spider, and possibly its accustomed auto siblings, to the rear-wheel-drive architectonics aftermost acclimated by the Spider in the ’90s, and the GTV in the ’80s. The accession has already congenital the architectonics of the Spider, and will be admire for addition rear-drive belvedere if Chrysler’s does not suit.

The owners of alpha believe that the idea to build a supercar with low volume which the spirit of Mark incarnates and provides of the selections of design for lower models in bottom of the balance - cleared with the half-compartment and the convertible one of the limit-edition 8C - worked spectacularly well.

Engines of Maserati and current speed were used for the original 8C, but Alfa Romeo 'total marketing director of S Sergio Cravero believes that a car based on new Ferrari California would be ideal as a its replacement.

It would be large if Ferrari let to us do it,� Cravero said, �but it is very difficult to convince them.� The 8C project will have broken even, financially speaking, before the 500 spiders currently in construction were delivered.

Alfa Romeo had provided to build only half-compartments, and each of the 500 sold quickly, but the request for an alternative of lower-top was so large that the company curved with the pressure.

Cravero believes that the project 8 C.A. carried out much more identification of mark than a calculation of the costs of publicity campaign of TV by similar amount of money, and is sharp to repeat the process.

The Alfa Romeo 33 Stradale is an extremely rare and cool road car built by Alfa Romeo. Only 18 are reported to have been made, plus three design studies based on the 33 Stradale the 33.2, Iguana and Carabo.

The Stradale, first built in 1967, was based on the Autodelta Alfa Romeo T33 racing car. The car, designed by Franco Scaglione, and built by Carrozzeria Marazzi, made its debut at the 1967 Turin Motorshow.

Built in an attempt by Alfa to make some of its racing technology available to the public, it was the most expensive automobile for sale to the public in 1968 at US$17,000 (when the average cost of a new car in 1968 was $2,822).

The Stradale is believed to be the first production vehicle to feature dihedral doors, also known as butterfly doors. The Stradale also features windows which seamlessly curve upward into the 'roof' of the vehicle.

The race-bred engine bore no relation to the mass-produced units in Alfa's more mainstream vehicles. Race engineer Carlo Chiti designed an oversquare (78 mm bore x 52,2 mm stroke) dry-sump lubricated 1,995 cc (121.7 cu in) V8 that featured SPICA fuel injection, four ignition coils and 16 spark plugs. The engine used four chain-driven camshafts to operate the valve train and had a rev-limit of 10000 rpm. The engine produced 230 bhp (172 kW) at 8800 rpm in road trim and 270 bhp (200 kW) in race trim.

In another break from convention, Alfa used a six-speed transaxle gearbox by Valerio Colotti. The car takes 5.5 seconds to reach 60 mph (96.56 km/h) from a standing start and has top speed of 260 km/h (160 mph