Millington - RETROPOWER

CLIENT NEEDS

An Alfa 105 that is as capable on track as it is cruising to coffee meets. An Alfaholics GTAR but turned up a few notches – a BMW M-series beater around a track!

OUR SOLUTION

We set out to create an Alfa 105 that blurs the line between road and race car. A machine as composed on a cross-country drive as it is devastatingly quick on track. By combining carbon doors, bonnet, and boot with an aluminium boot floor, we achieved a remarkable 870 kg dry weight which when combined with a 300+ bhp Millington 2.7-litre engine results in over 340bhp per ton. The bespoke Dedion rear axle reduces unsprung weight and lowers the roll-centre – a known 105 problem area. The interior provides a functional, but show-worthy environment for the pilot and the custom 7.5″ wide 3-piece alloys finish off the exterior perfectly!

KEY FACTS

Carbon doors, bonnet and boot
Aluminium boot floor
Bespoke Dedion rear axle
300+ bhp Millington 2.7 Litre engine
870kg dry weight

A classic Retropower creation this, and one we regularly hear cited as a fan favourite. It’s certainly Nat’s personal favourite project — the car he’d most like to own from the Retropower pantheon — and we think that counts as the highest of high praise.

The brief underpinning the build was fairly open-ended in nature, with the owner instead opting to set out a number of key requirements. The Alfa had to be both willing and able to go sideways at the drop of a hat, had to be naturally aspirated, and — the portion of the brief that proved trickiest to fulfil — he wanted it to be “faster around a track than any M-badged BMW available for sale new at the time.” Pressure? What pressure.

Such lofty aims certainly seemed a long way off when we first took delivery of the base car. It had spent a good few decades laid up in an old garage — a classic council affair that, while probably once fairly weatherproof, had since succumbed to the elements and started to collapse in on itself, entombing the little Alfa in the process. An auspicious beginning, this most certainly was not.

Our standard stripdown and assessment phase revealed a myriad of ferrous horrors, albeit nothing so extreme that it rendered the whole project a non-starter. There was rust, yes, but nothing we — or more accurately Stu — couldn’t handle.

And handle it we did. The poor Alfa shell was blasted, then all rotten metal was cut out and discarded. This phase of the build took a long time — longer than usual by dint of the paucity of off-the-peg spares available for Alfa Romeos of this vintage, either here or back ‘home’ in Italy.

Packaging ancillaries within the confines of such a dainty car was always going to be a struggle, which led us to fabricate a pair of “boxes” during the metalwork phase of the build, one under each of the front footwells. These now house the master cylinder and brake bias valve (driver’s side), and the battery and fuse box (passenger’s side), respectively, while keeping as much weight low down in the chassis as possible.

Meeting the brief set out by the Alfa’s owner was always going to entail some rather dramatic re-engineering of the Alfa’s oily bits, starting with its custom rear end. Now, you don’t need telling that messing with the rear suspension of a car like the GT Junior — one which owes its place in automotive history in part to its sublime handling — is a high-stakes business, which is why we proceeded with a mix of caution and engineering nous.

This is also how Nat came to find himself in an increasingly familiar position: lying under the car, working out how best to devise a custom rear suspension layout, a skill he’s since deployed in the creation of the bespoke arrangements found beneath the Ford Escort we built for Gordon Murray, as well as the duo of cars that followed — Project One and Project Kuma.

Effectively a modified De Dion tubular arrangement, this setup was selected as it represents the most effective means of reducing the Alfa’s roll centre without diluting the live-axle-derived handling that proved so enthralling when it was new.

Then there’s the diminutive Alfa’s trump card — its Millington Diamond engine. The brainchild of British engineering cult hero Roy Millington, the Diamond sprang from his desire to develop a lightweight, powerful, naturally aspirated twin-cam engine with a plentiful parts supply. At the time, the Cosworth YB fulfilled most of this brief (albeit with certain compromises arising from its origins as a turbocharged engine), but its iron block made it heavier than ideal and, increasingly, very expensive to keep in fine fettle.

As such, Roy — in conjunction with Richard Jenvey of throttle body renown — set about designing and casting a limited run of all-alloy YB-based engines designed for competition use from the outset.

Fast forward three-and-a-bit decades, and the Millington Diamond is a certified motorsport legend — the darling of race and rally drivers throughout the British Isles and beyond, found beneath the bonnets of everything from Mk2 Escorts to Westfields and everything in between.

Thus the decision to fit one in the diminutive Alfa was something of a no-brainer, and the Series II example selected has since been vindicated again and again, pushing out a whisker under 300 bhp — ample in a car with a kerb weight as low as this.

Underscoring the owner’s stated desire to drive this car on track, we opted to mate the Millington to a Sadev six-speed sequential gearbox — a transmission as effective as it is addictive to operate.

It would be wholly incorrect to assume this build was all about brute force at the expense of finesse, however, as a glance at the interior should make clear. Custom touches are everywhere, with two different types of contrasting tan leather painstakingly woven together by our in-house trimming specialist, Trimworks. You’ll find vast swathes of high-end leather throughout — from the Recaro Pole Position bucket seats to the door cards and dash, and everything in between. Suffice it to say the owner is unlikely to appear on PETA’s Christmas card list anytime soon.

Exterior alterations were kept deliberately low-key, as the GT Junior hails from a time when Alfa Romeo were at the peak of their game and producing some of the best-proportioned cars in the world. Only a fool would mess with near-automotive perfection, we thought, and as such we limited our efforts to a new paint job in a VW hue called Phoenix Blue. Composite panels dominate, with the boot, bonnet and doors all now carbon, and the boot floor made from alloy.

Since completion, the Retropower Alfa has proved to be a big hit — both with its owner, who has used it to tackle various circuits in its native Italy, and with those fortunate enough to witness it being driven in the manner in which it was conceived. In short, the Italian with an English heart is a certified Retropower icon, and a car everyone here is incredibly proud of.