1972 Alfa Romeo Montreal. Text and photos copyright Michael Lamm 2012
If I had the luxury of opening a private, very personal auto museum that contained the 80-odd cars I’ve owned over the past 52 years (and some were very odd indeed), I’d arrange them in descending order of favoritism. I’d park my favorite cars next to the entrance. Then would come those that I liked less and less and less than my favorites. Finally, way at the back of the building, tucked in just behind the Honda S600 roadster, would be my least favorite car, the 1972 Alfa Romeo Montreal I owned in 2007-2008.
Awful Romeo, I called it. Some cars, like puppies, want to do the right thing: They’re friendly, frisky and tail-waggingly anxious to please. To me, the Montreal was more like an intemperate ferret: aggressive, aggravating, high-strung, complicated and hard to live with.
The Montreal looked great on paper. An Alfa salesman could wow a potential customer with the car’s long list of engineering marvels. Before I get into those, though, I’d like to take you through a short history of how the Montreal came to be.
In the mid 1960s, Alfa Romeo commissioned Bertone to design and build a showcar for the 1967 Canadian World Expo in Montreal. The showcar, unnamed at the time, used an Alfa Giulia Sprint GT chassis and the 1,600cc, four-cylinder Giulia engine. Public reaction was positive enough to encourage Alfa to put a similar-looking car into production.
Company engineers Ozario Puliga and Giuseppe Busso feared, though, that the showcar’s 1,600cc engine wouldn’t do for a 2,800-pound coupe. So instead, they took inspiration from Alfa’s 2.0-liter Formula I racing V-8 and decided to wrap the production Montreal around a new engine based on that.
They ended up designing a tour de force – a state-of-the-art, 2.6-liter, quad-cam, all-aluminum, wet-sleeve, dry-sump V-8 with hemispherical combustion chambers, free-flowing exhausts, Spica mechanical fuel injection and Magneti Marelli transistor ignition. It was an engine any car company could rightly be proud of.
The V-8 revved smoothly to 7,000 RPM, developed 197 bhp at 6,500 RPM and 173 pound-feet of torque at 4,750 RPM. The Montreal could accelerate from zero to 60 MPH in approximately 7.2 seconds and had a top speed, according to reports of the day, of 137 MPH.
The new car’s chassis, suspension, steering, live rear axle and limited-slip differential were all taken from the Giulia GTV coupe. The five-speed ZF transmission and vented four-wheel disc brakes, however, were unique to the Montreal. Bertone built and supplied the 2+2 body, fully painted and with the interior installed.
In all, Alfa sold a total of 3,917 Montreals between 1971 and 1977. They were never safety- or smog-certified in the U.S. and thus weren’t imported into this country or Canada. The Montreals that ended up here came in one by one, mostly as used cars. Alfa did, though, distribute them throughout Europe and in England.
In Mike’s opinion, Bertone tossed a lot of 1970s styling cliches onto the Montreal, but most are for show. The NACA duct on the hood is blanked off, the headlamp doors serve no function, and only one of the sail-panel slots exhausts air from the interior.
Now, why did I call my Montreal an Awful Romeo? Basically, because I found its engineering unnecessarily complicated. That was the main reason. But I also felt its performance weak, its styling clichéd, and trying to work on the car proved an unspeakable pain in the tush.
When you tinker with or try to fix cars, some cooperate and others don’t. The Montreal was, without a doubt, the most obstinate, uncooperative car I’ve ever worked on. It did need help, and I tried my best to help it, but the mechanical complexity frustrated me at every turn.
(Okay, Alfa fans, I know you’re starting to question my objectivity. And no, I truly am not prejudiced against Alfas. Two of my sons have owned and loved Alfas, and one still has his – a very nice 1967 GTV.)
Coming Home on a Wing and a Prayer
Well, part of my problem was that the Montreal chose me; I didn’t choose it. This became another of those feral cars that followed me home. I’d actually answered an online classified ad for an early Mazda RX-7. The owner lived in Acampo, a rural community about 15 miles north of my home in Stockton, California. I drove up to Acampo to look at the RX-7, knocked on the owner’s door, and he then informed me that he’d taken the car to a mechanic’s shop nearby. Fine. We drove to the shop, and I looked at the RX-7. It turned out to be pretty ratty, which was why it was in the shop, and at that point I decided that the RX-7 definitely wasn’t for me.
As I turned to leave, I spotted the taillights of another car in a darkish corner of the shop, partially hidden behind a Mustang. At first, I didn’t recognize them, so I walked over, and sure enough, they belonged to a very dusty, forlorn-looking Alfa Montreal. As I was checking it out, the shop owner came over and asked if I’d be interested in buying the car. I said I might. It would depend on the price.
The shop owner told me the Montreal belonged to a family in Acampo that had inherited it from a grandfather, the dad’s dad. The grandfather had been an Alfa enthusiast, and he’d owned the Montreal for several years, but then he’d been taken ill and died. The family had no interest in keeping the car and, because the Montreal hadn’t run in a couple of years, they’d brought it to the garage to get it roadworthy so they could sell it. The garage owner said he hadn’t had time yet to touch it.
In 2007, Lamm discovered the Montreal by chance at the rear of a mechanic’s shop in Acampo, Calif. It hadn’t run in years and, as he was driving it home, the engine nearly caught fire.
I’d driven one other Montreal about a year earlier – a red one that belonged to an Alfa mechanic in Sacramento. He had it for sale for $25,000. Although his Montreal ran fine and appeared to be in good-enough condition, I wasn’t terribly impressed with it. Performance felt marginal, steering and handling likewise, the engine rattled at higher RPM, and to me it just didn’t seem worth anywhere near $25,000. So I passed.
I asked the Acampo shop owner how much the family was asking for this Montreal, and he said he thought around $13,000. He gave me a name and phone number, and that evening I called the deceased grandfather’s son. He told me, first, that he wasn’t really the owner, because the car was still in his dad’s name. But that was a technicality, and he was already working it out with the DMV.
“Does the car run?” I asked. He said it did, but not well. And he told me it needed a new battery for sure. Any other problems? Not that he was aware of. His dad had repainted the car about 10 years ago, changing the color from the factory Day-Glo lime green to metallic silver. Seats, headliner, glass, brightwork and everything else was original, and those items looked good.
Then came the question: How much? The fellow told me $13,000, and when I came back with an offer of $10,000, we ended up settling on $11,500. As I say, I never felt enthusiastic about Montreals, but for $11,500, I’d give this one a go. Done deal.
Comfortable front seats complement the Montreal’s well-sorted instruments and controls.
Rear seats have limited space, but fold flat to add cargo capacity. The Montreal is more a GT than a sports car.
There’s a protected storage area inside the hatch for smaller items.
JoAnne drove me up to Acampo in her Corolla. I’d put a set of metric tools in the trunk of her car, along with a new battery. When we got to the shop, I began to apply artificial respiration to the Montreal. With a healthy squirt of starter fluid and a little grinding, the engine fired.
I purposely kept revs low. The little 2.6-liter V-8 first caught on three cylinders, then four, then six and finally on seven, and that was as many as wanted to fire. The engine sounded awful and billowed out great clouds of exhaust smoke. After a minute or two, though, the smoke and noisiness subsided, and the Montreal seemed relatively okay, albeit still missing on one cylinder.
I’d mapped out a route along back roads and, because the Montreal was wearing expired license plates, I asked Jo to tuck in close behind me. So off we went, coughing and sputtering but actually moving along a lot better than I’d expected.
About a mile down the road, I started to smell oil smoke and noticed a mist eddying out from beneath the hood. I thought, “Uh oh, something’s burning,” and I hadn’t brought along a fire extinguisher. I pulled off to the side of the road, with Jo right behind me, jumped out and raised the hood. A great cloud billowed upward, but I could see through the smoke that motor oil was oozing from of the right-side cam cover and running down onto the hot exhaust header. So as long as the oil didn’t catch fire, we’d be all right. I crossed my fingers, and that’s how I drove home, smoking all the way but without flames, thank goodness. We made it into our driveway, and that’s where the fun of serious work was about to begin.
When I got the Montreal home and started to bring it back to some semblance of a civilized state, I found two major obstacles. One had to do with the Spica fuel-injection system, the other with the complicated distributor and its electronic ancillaries.
Getting it Done
Let me interrupt here and mention the two institutions that saved my sanity during this project. One was AlfaMontreal.info, and the second was Alfa Parts Exchange, fondly known as APE, and its congenial and knowledgeable owner, Larry Dickman Jr.
Larry actually made a couple of house calls from his business in Tracy, California, about 20 miles west of Stockton. He came to my house to help me put the Montreal right. Larry owns a Montreal himself, one that he’s grooming to race, and because the Montreal engine is so fussy and complex, I couldn’t have gotten the car to run right without his expertise. It takes a surgeon’s touch.
Today’s electronic fuel-injection systems work so well and reliably that we never give them a second thought. The Montreal’s Spica mechanical system, though, is a Rube Goldberg composite of eight little pistons, a control unit that meters fuel to the injectors depending on throttle angle and engine RPM, an atmospheric pressure compensator, a thermostatic actuator for different engine and ambient temperatures, a special sensor and circuit for cold starts, and a fuel shutoff for deceleration. If you want the Spica system to work, everything has to be in sync, and that’s where my first problem started.
The Montreal’s 2.6-liter aluminum V-8 was developed especially for this car, has chain-driven quad cams, Spica mechanical fuel injection and electronic ignition. It develops maximum power and torque at relatively high RPM and revs willingly to 7,000.
I fiddled and fussed and, for days, used the Spica name in vain. Over and over, I readjusted this and reset that, checking every turn of a screw against the instructions I’d printed out from the Montreal website. Nothing in or around the Spica was really accessible nor, in some cases, even visible. For one of the adjustments, I had to work by feel. I eventually did get all eight cylinders to fire, but the engine ran like an out-of-balance washing machine.
Just to get a respite from working on the Spica, I began to look at the Montreal’s distributor. Here I discovered another nightmare of complexity. The Montreal’s ignition system is really two in one. It uses a large, single distributor cap, but when I unclipped it and looked underneath, I discovered two rotors, one above the other on a vertical shaft. Beyond the distributor, the system included twin coils and two capacitive discharge units.
In theory, all this makes good sense, because each of the rotors supplies current to only four spark plugs and, since the posts inside the cap are spaced far apart, you’re not likely to get flashover. In a conventional, single-rotor distributor, the posts have to be close together, so at higher RPM you start to get misfiring due to flashover.
When I inspected the inside of the distributor cap on my Montreal, I found a couple of things that bothered me. First, the posts were eroded down almost to the Bakelite surface. I figured that couldn’t be good. Second, I found a hairline crack in the cap that ran from the central coil nipple to the bottom of the skirt. That couldn’t be good either.
So I numbered all the cap nipples, pulled out the wires, and brought the distributor cap out to Larry Dickman at APE in Tracy. Larry looked at it and pronounced it junk. The engine shouldn’t have run at all. Larry sold me a used cap and rotor in good condition for $300, and that’s when we started talking about the intricacies of the Spica unit.
Larry convinced me that an amateur, meaning me, had very little chance of making the Montreal engine run properly. It took a genuine understanding of the system, plus years of experience, to get everything in balance. And at that point, Larry very kindly volunteered to come out to my house that weekend and try to work his magic on the ferret-like Spica. I gladly took him up on his offer.
That Sunday, Larry came out with his own set of tools, and he slaved over the Spica for several hours. I marveled as the master deftly adjusted those critical screws, levers, rowels and springs that put the whole Spica cosmos in balance. At the end of his manipulations, the engine ran smoothly and sounded supremely confident – quite a transformation from its wild and ragged previous self. And when I offered to pay him, Larry said, “No, forget it.” I’m still in awe.
Without help from Alfa expert Larry Dickman Jr., Mike says he would never have gotten the fussy engine to run properly.
But the proof came in the driving. As with the red Montreal in Sacramento, my car’s performance felt weak. I powered it up through the gears several times, checking to see where the torque cut in and out. To me, acceleration seemed on a par with my 2000 Volkswagen Jetta VR6 – not slow but not exactly fast either.
And then I got thinking about the Montreal’s horsepower rating. Alfa’s published figure of 197 BHP came out in 1971, when manufacturers still measured engine output with all the accessories removed; in other words, gross horsepower. In 1972-73, the industry started quoting net horsepower, with the accessories installed. I don’t believe Alfa ever revised that initial gross figure, but in net terms, the 2.6-liter Montreal V-8 probably put out fewer horses than my 2.8-liter Jetta VR6; likewise torque. So no wonder the Montreal felt about like my Jetta and maybe a little slower.
As for unnecessary complexity, my mind flashed back to my 1967 Camaro convertible – an infinitely simpler car, much easier and less expensive to work on and maintain, totally reliable and virtually trouble-free. Alfa engineers Puliga and Busso did develop a gem of an engine for the Montreal, certainly on paper, but compared with Ed Cole’s small-block Chevy, the engine in my Camaro and millions of other cars, it couldn’t hold a candle.
I kept the Montreal for nine months and was overjoyed to see it go. I sold the car to a dealer in New York in March 2008 for $21,000, turning a profit of $7,012. Soon afterward, I checked the dealer’s website, and he had it listed for sale at $35,000. This was six months before the housing bubble burst, and he probably got it.
Michael Lamm grew up in South Texas. He has always loved cars and, after graduating from Columbia University in New York in 1959, took a job as editor of Foreign Car Guide, a magazine about VWs. In the mid 1960s, Mike became managing editor of Motor Trend and, in 1970, he co-founded Special-Interest Autos magazine in partnership with Hemmings Motor News. In 1978, Mike began to publish his own line of automotive books. For more information, go to www.LammMorada.com.