That Alfa was a pretty wild car...

I have a story about it I did some time ago:

Fast That’s Past – Brian Foley’s Alfa V8 - As published in Motor Racing Australia


After making his name in a Sprite and climbing to the top in a Mini, Brian Foley went racing in Porsches. But he always loved Alfas, so when the fastest Alfa he could get wasn’t fast enough he added a (rather different) V8.


The breeding was good – Alfa Romeo’s GTAm, or GT America, where the Trans-Am series was big news. But there’s a lot more to it than that, and it starts back in the early sixties when Alfa Romeo brought out the original 1600cc GTA.

This was an alloy-bodied car built as a specific model for Group 2 FIA touring car regulations. These specified 1000 units, but there’s little doubt that only 500 were ever built. They were caned in racing against Lotus Cortinas and suchlike all around the world.

A rule change led to the GTAm coming into being. The dimensions for cabin space and seating were increased, and Alfa were able to cater for the increase by reducing the thickness of the seat padding. Porsche, on the other hand, having really stretched the previous rules to get their 911s homologated as Touring Cars, were left out.

This, ironically, was the immediate reason Foley wanted to change cars. Or one of them.

Bearing in mind the production figure requirement, and the fact that a closer scrutiny of the numbers would be expected, Alfa couldn’t justify doing another car like the GTA with a number of alloy body panels.

So the GTAm was heavier, though its homologated weight was nicely optimistic at 920kgs. The American version of the 105 coupe was the car that was homologated, using mechanical fuel injection. A further improvement over the GTA was the bulging of the mudguards to cover the much wider tyres that had been introduced during the second half of the sixties.

The rules allowed replacement cylinder heads and enlargement to the class displacement limit, so cars coming from the production line that were earmarked for conversion to GTAm were sent to Autodelta and taken out to 1985cc.

They had some lightweighting done and did have alloy doors, boot lid and bonnet. Some cars had fiberglass doors instead of alloy, but even with these changes it was unlikely that the true weight came down from the original 1020kg to 920kg. Not without further help, anyway.

Brian Foley had been in the car sales business for a long time, operating in the southern suburbs of Sydney and selling BMC products. When it was obvious that he should move on from racing Minis, he had many and varied thoughts about what he should do.

That he went with the Porsche was almost out of character. Colin Devany, who helped prepare Foley’s cars for years, recalls that prior to going for the Porsche Foley was “muttering about a Rambler,” but the Porsche won. It might not have been a bad choice, Roger Penske ran them for a year or two and Mark Donohue won the Trans-Am in one.

But he bought the Porsche (maybe not enough money in the tobacco tin?) and before too long he hated it, so he transferred his interests.

The move to Alfa Romeo was a change that he liked and the prospect of racing a car with the Alfa’s heritage appealed to him greatly. That it was an inherently more stable car than the Porsche was no doubt a part of that appeal.

A part of the Alfa heritage he didn’t like was the fact that the car arrived in a very worn out state and needed a lot of time spent on it before it could be race-ready. This caused him to miss the start of the Australian Touring Car Championship series.

The car first appeared at Oran Park on March 28, 1971. It tailed Ian Geoghegan’s Mustang in a Sports Sedan event on that day after working its way up from fifth place and passing the Jaguar-Ford V8 of Barry Sharp. Not bad for a 2-litre 4-cylinder car!

The next four meetings at which it ran it trailed Jim McKeown’s Porsche home – Warwick Farm, Surfers Paradise, Mallala and Lakeside, the latter three being ATCC rounds. It was only scoring minor points.

The results weren’t spectacular, and then Foley agreed to lend the engine out of this car to David McKay for the Dulux Rally and missed a couple of meetings.

When he got the engine back the car went better. He beat McKeown at the AJC Trophy meeting at Warwick Farm and came in second to Geoghegan. Then at Lakeside’s September meeting Foley wrapped up the Gold Medal events for the day with a pair of wins.

The final 4-cylinder outing for the car was again at the Farm, where Foley was the first non-V8 again, but this time taking a fourth and a fifth place.

It was the disappointment that the car had little outright potential that caused Foley to cast his mind towards an engine change. There were wholesale changes taking place in the racing categories and Sports Sedans had reached a point where they were a serious and competitive racing category.

It was necessary in those times to retain the same brand of engine as the chassis, so Foley approached Alec Mildren about the V8 engines that had powered Kevin Bartlett to much success in Gold Star racing in 1968 and 1969. An engine was acquired and the job of installation was put under the guidance of Glenn Turner.

Oh, yes, along with the engine change, Foley had casually asked Turner and Colin Devany to ‘move the steering wheel to the right side of the car.’ “That part of the job caused us more trouble than fitting the engine,” Turner remembers. And so does Devany.

But they followed through on it because it would make Foley more comfortable than he had been in nine months running the car so far.

In moving the steering box to the right, they found that they either needed a RHD steering box or to mount the LHD steering box outside the engine bay, under the wheel arch. With room for the V8 and its extractor exhaust system at a premium, this was a logical way to go.

The workshop where the job was done was Ray Morris’ place at Taren Point. Convenient in a way – Morris made his living those days converting American cars from LHD to RHD! In these circumstances, making the two required idler arms and an additional link in the steering was easy. But when it came to moving the pedals there was strife because the footwell differed from right to left in this car.

An adaptor was made to fit the 300bhp 2.5-litre engine to the original gearbox, the engine was centralized in the engine bay (unlike the 4-cyl engine, which was biased to the right) and all the details worked out. They had a range of diff ratios to suit different circuits.

It was also necessary to build the engine up from the pile of bits that arrived from Mildren’s. New pistons were required with reduced compression ratio and some welding was required to repair the block.

In discussions with Mildren’s chief mechanic, Glenn Abbey, there had been talk of low oil pressure that the engine had suffered for a long time. “We found a split in the oil gallery in the block,” Devany recalls, “we welded that up and got the right oil pressure. It had been leaking into the crankcase ever since the block was damaged.”

So there was fabrication and fitting going on in the chassis to one side of the workshop and engine building and repair on the other. When then new pistons arrived they had to have the tops machined to drop the compression ratio. Then they needed balancing, so Colin took them and a file and a little grinder to the local pharmacy. “I borrowed their scales and weighed them, then I worked on them till I got the balance right, thanked the chemist and took them back to the workshop. They weren’t far out.”

When the engine was finally assembled, it was set up on a stand with a 44 gallon drum of water providing the necessary coolant. The trial running was satisfactory so the job of installation went on to completion.

A radiator was specially made for the job, a hole was cut into the bonnet for the intakes and the whole lot was completed in time for the May 7 Amaroo Park meeting.

There Foley met Bill Brown’s Porsche, a car with enviable speed around the hilly circuit. After taking pole, the Alfa wasn’t as fast off the grid as the Porsche so the first lap of each of the two races saw Brown in front. But up the hill the Alfa swept by both times, and with a lap record of 55.6 seconds Foley notched up two wins.

Two weeks later at Surfers Paradise he was unable to match the speed of the imported V8 tourers – Moffat (Mustang), Jane (Camaro) – or John Harvey in Jane’s Repco V8 powered lightweight Torana.

Hume Weir in June, however, showed what the car was capable of, running between Hamilton’s and Brown’s Porsches for a strong second place in the Riverina Trophy over 20 laps and a win in a handicap. His lap time in the handicap was 49.1 seconds, the best class time of the day.

There was a two month gap before the car got another airing. It had been running well and showing good speed allied with good handling and braking. The original GTAm brakes were well and truly up to the task, no small number of top line drivers having found themselves outbraked by the aggressive Foley.

Power was good for what it was too. The little V8 had given Bartlett and Gardner 300hp to tackle all comers in Tasman and Gold Star racing, and after this rebuild Merv Waggott’s dyno showed 305bhp. More than that, it sounded crisp and sharp, the flat plane crank giving it a very non-V8 note and twin megaphone exhausts creating sounds that enthusiasts of the day loved to hear.

And others heard it too, Devany told us. “You can’t do it today, but we used to cover up the numbers and sling trade plates on it to take it for a test run up the street. Brian’s first drive of the car was along Parraweena Road.”


Cont.