70 YEARS OF FORMULA 1
THE 1950s ALFA ROMEO 159
The end of the beginning
FOUR ALFA ROMEO 158S RAN IN THE FIRST-EVER F1 world championship race. Silverstone, 13 May 1950. A Saturday. Three of those cars finished one-two-three, the closest challenger two laps behind. Not by coincidence did the first season of one of the world’s most tech-centred sport kick off behind one of the most technologically superior and successful GP cars in history.
Alfetta means “little Alfa” in Italian. In 1950, the 158 was more than a decade old. The Alfa was originally designed for pre-War Voiturette racing — a “step-down” class with displacement limited to 1.5 litres. By the late ’30s, Hitler’s state-backed Silver Arrows had dominated Grands Prix for several seasons. Italy didn’t have Hitler’s money, but it did have genius engineers. And so the best of those men decided to drop down to Voiturette, where the Germans weren’t playing, and where Alfa had a shot at winning.
The car crafted for that purpose was designed by Gioacchino Colombo in Milan. The “15” in its name stood for 1,500 cc, the “8” for the number of cylinders in its under-square, twin-cam, methanol-fed, magnesium-blocked engine. Pre-War, a Roots blower gave around 17 psi of boost; 190 hp helped motivate wire wheels, a transaxle, a centre throttle, a 98-inch (2,489-mm) wheelbase, and transverse leaf springs. The straight-eight looked a lot like Alfa’s pre-War 8C motors, baroque and tall and blatty. It lived in a cigar body, much the day’s fashion, resembling later Maseratis or earlier Mercedes.
Italy didn’t have Hitler’s money but it did have genius engineers
But Voiturette success wasn’t easy; Germans soon ran there as well. When the War came to an end, the surviving cars were dragged into daylight and cleaned up; free of the Germans, they dominated, aeons ahead of anything like competition. At that first F1 race, the marque’s driver roster included the three “Fa” virtuosos — Giuseppe Farina, Luigi Fagioli, and Juan Manuel Fangio. Wins came as easy as breathing and not slowly. (Fangio saw 309 km/h at Pescara.) Farina was champion, Fangio and Fagioli just behind.
The 159 was the next-season attempt to stay in front. To the 158’s profile it added a stiffer frame and a two-stage supercharger — a mad set-up with one large blower priming a smaller one — and a more predictable de Dion tube instead of the old rear swing axle. There were also larger fuel-tanks, because the engine now saw around 40(!) psi of boost in pursuit of some 425 hp at 9,300 rpm. (The car’s purpose-built, triple-choke Weber carburettor had two 3.9-mm main jets — small fire hoses in brass.) One of the greatest drawbacks was the resultant fuel consumption and the huge tanks (nearly 225 litres in total) and frequent fuel stops needed to slake that thirst.
A 159 took Fangio to his first world championship, in 1951, against
