Alfa Romeo Montreal Club

Alpine trial for new purchase

The Montreal polarizes interests: engine or design? Both are extreme in conception and execution, and people’s opening gambits usually involve one or the other, rarely both. It’s the same in our family - I like the oily bits and my husband, a car designer, loves the Bertone/Gandini styling. And we both have issues with our preferred areas of specialisation: me with the complicated Tipo 33-derived engine, and he with the fact that the resale red respray on top of the original orange is hiding filler in the offside rear light cluster, which makes the tail look completely skewiff.

'When a friend of mine was looking to offload the car, not a single rational thought ran through my mind'

Alfa Romeo Montreal
Name Joanne Marshall
From Barnstaple, Devon
Occupation Head of EMEA Communications, Ferrari
Age 51
First classic Lancia Fulvia
Dream classic Anything pre-war, light and simple
Favourite driving song Talking Heads Listening Wind
Best drive The Grossglockner

I’m not new to Alfa ownership and the frankly unhealthy familiarity with friendly, but expensive, mechanics that it can come with. Chronologically: Alfasud 1.3 SC, Alfetta GTV2.0, 156 1.9JTD and lastly - and most ruinously - 156 Crosswagon. And yet that almost bloody-minded, always-looking- for-another fixation never goes away. So, when a friend of mine was looking to offload his Montreal, not a single objective, rational thought ran through my mind.

But even I will admit to a later moment of self-doubt when I realised that the camshafts run in the aluminium heads without bearings, and that the rest of the engine is truly up there in the Pantheon of supercar sophistication. But at least it works well, albeit after moderate fettling following the car’s lengthy stretch of not being used. That was down to the Italian bureaucracy involved in importing the car and getting it registered here for the first time. It took a nightmare 11 months, with a Catch 22 situation lurking behind every twist in the unending paper trail.

We registered the car with the official Alfa Romeo Register in Milan, which brings the benefit of cheap classic car insurance. But even that had a hidden downside - the membership application documentation asked for details of any work carried out on the car and where it was undertaken. I blithely wrote down Parma. Little did I know that would prevent me from getting the car tested for its MoT in Modena, which is closer to home and has a vehicle licensing office that is used to dealing with £ imported old cars. No one has ever g been able to explain to me what о relevance where you get any work § done has to an MoT with national sj validity. But let’s not go there. Nor Si ask me to explain why it failed the first time round because it was “leaking oil”. A grumpy “That’s because there’s oil in it” failed to bring the technician around.

A subsequent overheating problem nearly threw a spanner into the works for plans to take the car on its inaugural long-distance trip to Austria. Visions of the engine coming out to skim the heads faded when our latest, and soon-to-be- familiar, Alfa mechanic diagnosed a knackered fan, a cable tie, the wrong radiator cap and non-original thermostat - in that order.

The Montreal took the Cross-roads Designer Rallye in its stride, covering 1700km and five Alpine passes with neither oil nor water ever above 80°C. And at least now I can relax in the knowledge that the handling and brakes are a lot better than I feared. Yes, it is a Giulia with an extra 250kg or so, worm-and- roller steering and no assistance. But that means faithful handling and surprisingly good roadholding. And what a fabulous gearbox.

So, what did the designers on the rally think? A massive thumbs-up! Marshall fortunately managed to get the Alfa's overheating problems sorted before taking the caron its first long run into the Alps.

Designer husband is a fan of Alfa’s shape. Montreal's roadholding turned out to be impressive over challenging, twisty Alpine roads. Crossroads Rallye covered 1700km in all. KTM X-Bow leads Montreal and Porsche.