Background
The Alfa Romeo SZ/RZ, or Il Mostro (‘The Monster’), as it quickly became known, is a rare jewel of bonkers Italian engineering that today reminds us that single-mindedness, whimsy, innovation and contrariness were alive and well 30 years ago in Milan, even if the rest of the automotive world wasn’t quite ready for any of it – then or now.
Aesthetically, these cars look like they’ve been designed and built by Edward Scissorhands.
During his cubist period.
They’re all elbows-out angles, in-your-face edges and straight lines.
They came out of the same late 80s/early 90s design ethos that spawned huge shoulder pads, looked back to Art Deco and looked forward to the imagined futurism of the coming new millennium.
These are Marmite cars - catnip to some and kryptonite to others.
Some of the team at The Market weep tears of pure joy whenever they see one and it’s all we can do to prize the steering wheel from their fevered, white-knuckled grip.
Others have to be led gently to a dark room and made to listen to whale song until they’ve stopped shaking and feel better.
Whichever camp you’re in, there’s no denying that these were ground-breaking machines, born of the new possibilities presented by nascent CAD/CAM design technology, breakthrough materials and some very brave people sitting round a boardroom table hoping to reinvigorate the then somewhat faded reputations of both Alfa Romeo and Zagato.
There’s also no denying that these are proper drivers’ cars – you can’t drive them slowly and you’ll insist on having the roof down even in the pouring rain so you can hear that glorious, creamy 3.0 litre V6 doing its thing.
Contrary to what you might think, Zagato’s contribution was largely in coachbuilding and construction. The design was primarily an in-house Alfa Romeo/Fiat project.
Launched at the Geneva Motor Show in 1989, the SZ (Sport Zagato) is even more revolutionary under its skin than it looks. The body panels are crafted from ‘Modar TM’, a fibreglass-reinforced synthetic resin. This new material, in true Italian fashion, brought its own challenges, not least of which was getting the paint to stick to it without blistering.
On the upside, it gave a very smooth outside surface to the body panels, all of which were bonded to a load-bearing steel framework for extra chassis rigidity.
Despite the panels being relatively thick (and therefore heavy) by modern standards, the SZ ended up tipping the scales at a not-unreasonable 1,256kgs, thanks in part to the aluminium roof.
It was also very aerodynamic with a drag coefficient of 0.30, a figure that withstands scrutiny even today. Performance was lively, rather than ferocious, with 62mph coming up in around 7.5 seconds before pressing on towards a top speed of a tad over 150mph, courtesy of Alfa’s legendary 3.0 litre V6 engine with its 210bhp and 181lb/ft of torque.
The final chassis tuning was done by Giorgio Pianta, who later became the team manager for the DTM Alfa Romeo team.
Up to 1.4G in cornering forces was said to be available to anyone sufficiently brave or talented to push that hard in a car with no anti-lock, anti-skid, anti-fly-backwards-through-a-hedge-at-great-speed safety technology whatsoever.
The four-year production run saw 1,036 SZ models built, plus a far smaller number of cabriolets, or RZ (Roadster Zagato), such as the one we currently have at our Abingdon HQ.
Virtually all the body panels on the RZ differ from those on its SZ cousin.
No wonder they didn’t make many.
The SZ and the even rarer and more expensive RZ belong to that vanishingly small group of cars that have successfully made the long journey from fanciful idea to production model without being watered down, compromised, diluted, emasculated or otherwise beaten into bland conformity.
Somehow, the accountants and management consultants were kept at bay long enough for these designs to see the light of day……and for the resulting financial chaos to send Zagato into receivership.
Swings and roundabouts.
They look like nothing that came before them.
Or after them.
All 278 RZs left the factory as LHD models. 50 were exported to the UK. 1 was exported to Jersey, where the owner must have had at least 14 minutes of fun before he’d exhausted the possibilities of the island’s road network.
This car is number 221 of all the RZs ever made.
And that makes it rarer than teeth on a particularly endangered breed of hen.
