[alfa] (We're not done yet!)

["John Hertzman" <johnhertzman@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Joe Elliott 'had to ask' whether the "S" of the Giulietta SV "was really "S" for Sprint, or was it "S" for Sports?"

You don't have to look very far to find that the first car in the Giulietta Zagato lineage was a privately owned Giulietta Sprint Veloce which was wrecked and then rebodied by Zagato for the owner, and which was commonly known as a Sprint Veloce Zagato, or SVZ. Logical enough; in everything except the body it was a Sprint Veloce. Several other SVZ's followed, each a one-off commissioned by its owner, along with an SVM (by Michelotti) before Alfa decided that the car they intended to supplant the SVZ (the Sprint Spinta or, later, Sprint Speciale, SS either way) was not as competitive as the Zagatos, and went along with Zagato's further development of the SZ on the Spider platform while developing the SS as a more luxurious road car.
 
"Sport", Joe's alternate suggestion was not part of Alfa's naming vocabulary for road cars after the prewar 6C 2500 went out of production in 1951; "Sport" was used on a few .competition prototypes, but no more often than Competizione. Sprint was the standard basic term in the 1900 era for coupes and for coachbuilders' platforms developed for the coupes, which might include cabriolets. Much earlier Grand Touring (and other analogous terms) also meant entirely different things in different decades; there are cars on Alfa's Gran Turismo chassis with Spider, Phaeton, coupe and four-door Berlina bodies. 
 
Brian Shorey wrote, during the TZ discussion, "I'd never heard Gran Turismo.  Quite frankly, that wouldn't make sense to me, these weren't grand touring cars, were they?" Yes, (arguably) they were; the term Gran Turismo had been out of use for a quarter of a century, and was not used by Alfa on such cars as the 8C 2900 Berlinettas, which certainly were grand touring cars in the sense that a Ferrari GT was twenty years later. Context (including time) counts. Alfa used the words Gran Turismo (but not the initials GT or G.T.) in the twenties and thirties, dropped the term and the initials in the forties and fifties, and returned to the use of the initials (but not the words) with the Sprint GT in the same year that the Giulia TZ appeared. I suspect that the "T" is not unrelated to the T in TI, as in the 1900 TI, Giulietta TI, and Giulia TI, all related to a popular racing classification, but I'm not about to argue the point.
 
Enjoy yours,
John H.
Raleigh, N.C.
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