What a car! What a sound!

Alfa Romeo Spider 3.0 V6 12v

Year: 2000 | Motorization: 2959 cc | Color: Grigio Eclisse

It is March 23, 2000, Europe does not yet know the single currency, in Italy a shaky Fiat announces a historic agreement with GM that suggests a black future for the national motorist industry. And in those days, in Berlin, its first owner was given the car that I would have taken back to Turin 18 years later: an Alfa Romeo Spider 3.0 V6, full optional, eclipse gray with Jerez red leather interior.

I was about to turn 14, I knew the Quattoruote list by heart and for me it was the dream car. It was an Alfa Romeo was a Spider, it was a 3000, it was a 6-cylinder, it had a line so different from all and it was impossible to find: I went through every Spider hatch I met on the street, but they were all inexorably 2.0 Twin Spark.

In the middle a life, a scooter, a diploma, a motorcycle, a car, a degree in engineering, a job in the motoring world, a marriage…

And in a moment we are in the autumn 2018, it’s September, I’m having dinner at a restaurant in southern Germany with a local colleague. Arrived at the end as always we talk about cars. He tells me about his dream as a kid (an E31 v12) and me about mine and why I can’t compromise and get a Z3, a Boxster or a SLK.

The Spider (project 916) was the last car produced in the Arese plants, a plant where the engine was also born. He too is the last one to come out of the drafting team for the Busso engineer team.

Restrained by a fairly heavy price list (over 80 million) the combination of the spider and the 6-cylinder was particularly rare, in 10 years of production just over 5,000 spiders were produced with the v6 in its evolution (3.0 12v, 3.0 24v, 2.0 V6T, 3.2 24v) out of a total of almost 40,000 spiders exited from the Arese plant until 2000 and from the gates of Pininfarina until 2004.

He tells me that almost all of them came to Germany with the V6, and so we put ourselves to the search and in the end the right one arrives with a stroke of luck. Now it is in Hamburg, it has 72 kkm and it’s like I want it: second series, 12 valves, red interiors, electric roof, sober color, made in Arese. The owner is an enthusiast, we send a trusted mechanic to see her with a mandate to take it if it’s okay. I live all at a distance waiting for the phone call that does not arrive.

At the end the phone rings, prefix +49, I answer: now you understand why you are looking for it and in the 800 km of highway that separates you from your house is literally enthusiastic “what a car! what a sound! ”.

Needless to say, I leave with a friend the week to go and get it. I sit behind the wheel, turn the key, the “Busso” is the soul, and we are ready to take the journey to Turin: 1000 km of rain and snow but the journey is unforgettable.

The entry into the Autobahn takes our breath away, second, third, fourth the sound invades the cockpit. No it is not a vulgar exhaust sound, it is a sound of aspiration, of distribution, of 6 cylinders that rise above 5000 rpm and seem to never end. Then the Brenner arrives, and I realize that around the engine there is also a car, it is in the street, it is fast, it brakes, the dreaded understeer is absolutely to be set aside in the paranoia…

I get home, parking in the garage, I did it.