Burt Levy on Selling and Racing Alfa Romeos

By Burt Levy

Craig Morningstar was a big, Viking-looking guy with a great sense of humor, a huge love for Italian cars and motorcycles and a massive taste for fun. And he needed that sense of humor because it was his job to visit Alfa dealerships, make nice with the dealership principals and staff and smooth the ruffled feathers of sometimes—no, make that more than sometimes—indignant recent Alfa purchasers who had encountered difficulties, real or imagined, that the dealership couldn’t seem to satisfy.

Some had simply fallen out of love with their cars and wanted their money back, a request that neither Craig nor the dealership could accommodate. I first met him when I was trying to sell Alfas (along with VWs, Mercedes-Benzes and Rolls-Royces) at Loeber Motors in downtown Chicago.

Let me explain that this was 1976, and the then-current range of Alfa models were, typical of the breed, svelte and lovely to look at, sweet to drive and, umm, a bit quirky to live with. Take the much (and, I think, unfairly) maligned SPICA fuel injection, which was Alfa’s answer to America’s emerging emissions-control regulations. It was actually a pretty good system. Not to mention amazingly clever. Think of it as a mechanical, rather than electronic, computer. But it took some learning, and new owners had to be gently but firmly schooled in its proper operation.

Like if you got into your Alfa on a cold day, the correct procedure was to KEEP YOUR EFFING FOOT OFF THE DAMN GAS PEDAL, turn the key and that wonderful little four-cylinder twincam would grumble and burble to life. Every time. Even when the temperature dipped well below zero, as it is wont to do in Chicago during the wintertime. But if, on the other hand, you pumped the gas pedal first—and especially if you pumped it repeatedly and/or relentlessly—you would soon find yourself (there being no such thing as cell phones back then) standing there shivering in a little street-corner phone booth with frost on all the windows, explaining through clenched, chattering teeth that you needed a damn tow truck. Again…

The other problem with SPICA fuel-injection systems was the idiots who worked on them. Particularly independent “sportscar shop” grease monkeys who had no idea whatsoever of how the damn things worked. So they’d start fiddling with this and poking at that and messing with every visible adjuster screw and threaded linkage coupling they could find…just because they could! Leading, as you can imagine, to some very disenchanted Alfa Romeo owners. And that’s not even mentioning how the sheetmetal on that particular generation of Alfas started rusting on the boat ride over from Italy. And let’s not even mention “depreciation,” which tended to begin even as the signature ink on the bill of sale was drying. But if you knew Alfas and loved Alfas, they were fabulous cars. Brilliantly engineered, sexy to look at, reasonably fast, tremendously forgiving, lots of savoir faire for the money and great fun to drive.

Humble Beginnings

Now my dad had a British-bulldog Triumph TR3 when I was a wee tad of 16, and it was typical of moderately priced British sports cars in that it was basically a bunch of lying-around and not particularly inspiring old English sedan parts re-imagined in low-slung roadster bodywork. But I loved that TR3, and it’s a testament to the car’s brakes, road manners and temperament that I didn’t manage to kill myself with it. Lord knows I tried. But it was a clunky, agricultural sort of device (the motor was first cousin to a Massey-Ferguson tractor engine…look it up) compared to a pur sang road warrior like an Alfa Romeo. But of course I didn’t know that yet.

As fate would have it, my first racecar was also a TR3, not so much out of any grand plan or cosmic destiny, but because I saw this semi-raggedy, road-grader orange TR3 racecar sitting on the back corner of the local Saab dealer’s used-car lot. It was in pretty sad shape. Which also meant I might actually be able to afford it! After helping one of the Saab mechanics put in a new clutch—my very first mechanical racecar work, but far from my last—I went racing. Sort of.

Suffice to say that wheels came off in two of my first three races, and it was becoming increasingly obvious that I didn’t know what I was doing either in the garage or on the racetrack and that there were lessons to be learned. I was meanwhile falling victim to that age-old racer’s conundrum of wanting—nay, needing!—to go ever faster, buying all sorts of trick parts and go-faster goodies from California rather than concentrating on preparing a car that might actually finish a damn race.

It was slowly dawning on me that I was sniffing around the wrong tree, and that I should sell off my old TR3 (see sign below), buy a Formula Ford and embark on the stellar racing career that was surely my destiny and that would ultimately lead to the podium at Monaco and a kiss from Princess Grace. I imagined her lips tasted like cherries jubilee…

As you can see, I was way ahead of the curve vis-a-vis the vintage racing phenomenon AND the “truth in advertising” craze!

And then along came Carol

Only then I met Carol. On a blind date, of all things. And we couldn’t have been more different. We got married anyway, on her birthday (also Valentines’ Day) 1974, and immediately opened a sportscar shop of our own (Mellow Motors at 747 Wrightwood on Chicago’s soon-to-be-trendy near North side) so I would have a base of operations for my soon to be wildly successful racing career.

Like many other of my grand ideas, that didn’t quite work out as planned. In fact, it was pretty much a disaster. By all rights Mellow Motors should have gone broke—Lord knows we deserved it—but we managed to find another starry-eyed young “car guy” with a few dollars in his pocket, and he bought the business from us shortly before we would have gone down for the third time of our own accord.

I took a job I wound up hating as a service writer at a thoroughly medieval Lincoln-Mercury dealership, then answered an ad from a Mercedes-Benz dealer looking for a service manager. Turns out I was hopelessly unqualified for that particular gig (no surprise there) but at the end of the interview, the dealership’s GM said: “Levy, with your line of bullshit, you should be in sales,” and he offered me a job selling cars on the spot. Really he did.

And that, dear friends, is how I wound up working the sales floor at the Alfa, VW, Mercedes-Benz & Rolls Royce dealership in downtown Chicago. And I did pretty well at it. I truly believed that the new, fuel-injected VW Rabbit was the best small car you could buy (and it was) and I could talk simpatico Alfa talk with all the Alfisti and soon-to-be Alfisti who wandered in. A few of whom even bought cars! Alfa customers generally fell into two distinct categories: those who would never be without one and those who would never own another one.

Saved by the mob

Now my personal racing career had been pretty much on enforced hiatus, but by now I was selling some cars and making a little money and getting the old itch again. And that’s when the green ’74 Alfa Spider with the badly crunched in LF fender appeared in the dealership’s body shop. Seems the owner of record (who had bought several cars from us, mostly Mercedes) had bought the Alfa for his daughter. And she loved it! At least until she tried living with it, anyway. Turns out that, although she surely loved sexy, sporty, two-seater convertibles, she was really more of an automatic-transmission/air-conditioning automotive archtype. So it was strangely fortuitous when her Alfa got tagged pretty heavily by a backing-up city dump truck. I believe her father may have had a few connections at City Hall. In any case, it looked a lot worse than it really was. But the good customer prevailed on the dealership’s body-shop foreman to declare the Spider a “total,” and that was almost feasible thanks to the observation about an Alfa Romeo’s depreciation curve (imagine the downhill slope of a ski jump) mentioned above. It surely helped that the insurance adjuster got a really nice bottle of scotch from the dealership’s body-shop every Christmas.

So the green Spider with the crunched left-front is sitting up there on the third floor and I can’t help but pass by it and walk around it and look under it a couple times each day, and it isn’t long before a plan is hatching in both my head and bank account. Mind you, I’ve never owned or raced an Alfa Romeo before, but I know the legends, love that beautifully symmetrical and mellifluous twincam engine, and am moreover married to an Italian girl. Hell, I’m already starting to talk with my hands and bring home bottles of Chianti in those little wicker baskets.

By God, I’m going racing again! And in an Alfa Romeo Spider!

And in the meantime, while you are stuck inside, try listening to a good audiobook…