Thank Frankel it's Friday: A Montreal in Monaco, Alfa Romeo's first postwar supercar

For me the Montreal resides in that vanishingly rare category of cars I still manage to adore, even after the driving experience has done all it can to put me off. I’ll never own one, not least because the bills would scare me, but I loved the Montreal before I drove it and I still do, years after it proved to be such a disappointment on the road.

So why? I guess because it’s a genuinely crazy car, if not in execution, then certainly in concept. Imagine a supermodel marrying an Olympic athlete and then deciding to live in a dilapidated semi on the outskirts of Slough. That, in a nutshell, is the Montreal. The car did indeed start life as a model, namely as a Bertone show car for the 1967 Montreal Expo. It was never intended for production which is why it was not until the 1970 Geneva show that it was shown in ready to buy form. It wasn’t even called Montreal until then. By which time the four-cylinder motor in the show car had been replaced by a 2.6-litre derivative of the V8 racing engine used in the T33 sports car. So that was the athlete. But once married, where should they live? All Alfa Romeo had available was the 105-series chassis with its live rear axle, which was fairly blameless if you wanted a Giulia saloon but for Alfa’s first postwar supercar? And that was the semi. Really?

Really. Marcello Gandini’s lines were so beautiful, but they wrote no cheque the engine could not cash in full. It’s a properly howling V8 with just a touch of Detroit thunder about it too, and if you listen to it, those racing roots are absolutely unmistakeable. 

I even didn’t mind that the interior was quite mad, in fact I’d have been disappointed had the switchgear been a paragon of ergonomic excellence, or the pedals positioned directly in front of the driver. There are traditions to uphold, after all.

And it was lovely to drive, at least as first. The live rear axle will always compromise ride quality, but on tall squishy Michelin XWX tyres, there’s enough give in the sidewalls to soak up the worst of it. It’s not in the least bit fast by modern standards, but would probably still five a Dino 246GT a run for its money in a straight line.

Not so much in the corners. If you don’t try too hard the Montreal is faithful enough, but if you hustle the car in the way the engine implores you to… well frankly I’d not bother. It’s well balanced enough on a smooth dry road, but as soon as you throw it a challenge such as a wet, bumpy or off-camber camber, it in turn throws up its arms in horror. I remember being genuinely alarmed by the lack of front-end grip and how easily the suspension relinquished control of its body movements. This is a car you should be able to sling around, and the irony is that you can do that with this chassis when used in lesser Alfas like Giulias, Juniors and Sprint GTs; but ask it to handle near double the power and it just can’t cope.

Yet that doesn’t stop me wanting one and when I looked them up I was surprised that they’re priced from around £40,000, not much for such a rare slice of exotica with genuine competition pedigree under the bonnet. Then I think of the costs of maintaining that fuel injection system in top working order, let alone those of rebuilding a bespoke engine used in no other road car and my ardour dampens somewhat. I suspect the best Montreal is someone else’s Montreal, and I hope one day to renew my acquaintance with it.