Alfa Romeo’s exotic GTV cost twice as much as Ford’s blue-collar hero Cortina II Lotus when it arrived on UK shores, but was it twice the car?
WORDS SIMON HUCKNALL PHOTOGRAPHY MAX EDLESTON
If you had been at Oliverʼs Mount for the final round of the Castrol/BARC Hill Climb Championship in 1970, you would have been high on not only the heady mixture of bracing North Sea air and the sweet aroma of Castrol R racing oil, but also the eclectic programme of road-based competition cars. Triumph Spitfires and TR5s, TVR 1800s, Austin-Healey Sprites and Jaguar E-types would have been vying for end-of-season honours at the Scarborough course. Save a solitary Porsche 911, everything trackside was been homespun – a scenario that would inevitably have played out in the spectatorsʼ car park, too, with foreign-built models making up just 10% of the vehicles on Britainʼs roads at the time.
But in 1970 the tide was turning, and while a Ford Cortina II Lotus would still have been as familiar a sight as string-backed driving gloves, junior exotica such as the 105-series Alfa Romeo GT Veloce was starting to gain popularity among well-heeled enthusiasts keen to explore automotive talent from beyond the UKʼs shores. The 1750 GTV was launched in 1967, arriving a year after the Cortina II Lotus, and although the Ford would be drawing its last breaths in the UK market by the time of that season-ending event, new-car buyers would still have had the choice between Dagenhamʼs hot-around-the-blue-collar Cortina or its suave Milanese rival. Of course, budget would have ruled out the Alfa for many, with it costing nearly twice as much as the £1266 Ford at £2300. But price aside, a lingering suspicion of anything not home-grown may still have pushed some towards the sporting Cortina.
So was the GTVreally worth two Lotus-fettled Cortinas? To find out, weʼve brought both cars back to Oliverʼs Mount to settle the score. The more observant will already have spotted that the Alfa representative is, in fact, a very early 2000 GTV, which succeeded the 1750 model in 1971. Weʼll look at what changes the 2000 brought shortly, but fundamentally it marked an evolution of the 1750 rather than any kind of sea-change, so the comparison with the Cortina remains a valid one.
Both the 1750 and 2000 GTVʼs design dated back to 1963, when it appeared as the 1600 Giulia Sprint GT. Styled by Giorgetto Giugiaro at Bertone, the pretty two-plus-two body had shades of his earlier 2000/2600 Sprint and was based around a shortened Giulia saloon p
