The Alfa Romeo Giulia Sprint GTA Is the Lightweight That Redefined What a Racing Saloon Could Be
Autodelta, Alfa Romeo’s racing arm, produced the Giulia Sprint GTA by taking the standard Sprint GT coupe and replacing most of its steel body panels with aluminum. The result — GTA stands for Gran Turismo Alleggerita, lightened — weighed approximately 745 kilograms, which is roughly half the weight of a modern compact car and 200 kilograms less than the standard Sprint GT it was derived from. Into this lightweight package went a 1,570cc twin-cam four-cylinder that produced 115 horsepower in road tune and upward of 170 in full race preparation, driving through a five-speed gearbox to a limited-slip differential.
The GTA won the European Touring Car Championship in 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, and 1971. The car’s dominance of saloon car racing in the late 1960s was built on a combination of the Autodelta engine’s reliability and power, the chassis’s handling balance, and the driving of Jochen Rindt, Andrea de Adamich, and Toine Hezemans — drivers who extracted from the GTA performances that its power output did not obviously suggest possible.
The Mechanical Formula
The GTA’s twin-spark cylinder head — Alfa Romeo used twin spark plugs per cylinder for improved combustion efficiency before the technology became fashionable — was a significant engineering element that contributed to the engine’s specific power and reliability. The carbureted versions used twin Weber 45 DCOEs in competition preparation, producing a specific induction sound that drivers who have experienced it describe with the evangelism of religious converts.
The aluminum body panels were formed at Zagato’s facility in Milan. The doors, bonnet, boot lid, and front and rear bumpers were all aluminum. The windscreen and side windows were acrylic rather than glass on the competition cars. The interior was stripped to the minimum required for the GT class regulations: two seats, instruments, a roll cage in the race cars.
Road Car Reality
The road-legal GTA is a more demanding ownership proposition than its relatively modest specifications suggest. The aluminum panels corrode galvanically where they contact the steel structure, which means that any GTA with deferred maintenance has structural issues that are expensive to address correctly. The electrical system is Italian of the period. The twin-cam requires the specific mechanical sympathy that Italian engines reward and punish in equal measure — correct maintenance produces an engine of extraordinary refinement; deferred maintenance produces an engine of increasing unreliability.
The specialist network in Italy and the United Kingdom is sufficient for correct work, but finding mechanics with GTA-specific knowledge outside of these concentrations requires research. Autodelta-supplied parts have been reproduced by specialists, and the community around these cars in Italy remains active enough that information is available to owners who engage with it.
Values
The GTA market has reached levels that reflect both the cars’ racing significance and their genuine rarity — approximately 500 GTAs were produced in all variants, with a meaningful portion having been raced hard and retired to barns or worse. A correct, documented car in good condition asks €500,000 to €900,000. The competition-history cars — particularly those with documentation of their European championship participation — command premiums that the road cars do not approach. These are serious collector cars in every sense.