Alfa Romeo Giulia TZ

Ercole Spada was in his mid-twenties when he drew this, and it is the design that made his name. The controlling idea is the Kamm tail, the coda tronca, applying Wunibald Kamm's finding that a tail cut off abruptly loses very little to drag while shedding lift. Zagato had already proved it on the Giulietta SZ coda tronca sports racers, and the TZ is the developed version: a low, wide, snub-nosed shape with a sharply truncated rear deck and a three-piece rear window, sitting only 1,199mm tall over a 2,200mm wheelbase. The nose carries a version of the Alfa shield reduced almost to a badge, flanked by faired-in lamps under plexiglass. There is no ornament anywhere on the car. The TZ2 takes the same logic further and reads as a different design entirely, 270mm shorter, 100mm wider, 179mm lower and moulded rather than beaten, and it is one of the very few 1960s shapes that looks smaller in the flesh than in photographs.

The TZ arrived and won straight away. On its 1963 debut at the FISA Monza Cup, TZs filled the first four places in the prototype category. Homologated into Gran Turismo at the start of 1964 once the hundredth car was built, it then took class wins across the entire international calendar in a single season: the 12 Hours of Sebring, where Jim Kaser and Chuck Stoddard won the class; the Targa Florio, a class one-two-three with Roberto Bussinello and Nino Todaro third overall behind two Porsche 904s; the Nürburgring 1000km, a class one-two for Giampiero Biscaldi and Ernst Furtmayr; and the Le Mans 24 Hours, a class one-two for Bussinello and Bruno Deserti. Many of those entries came through the quasi-works Scuderia Sant'Ambroeus rather than from the factory directly. Class wins continued into 1965 and 1966 in the 1600 GT category before development was halted at the end of 1965 so Autodelta could concentrate on the GTA. Carlo Chiti's operation, which began as a consultancy on this project, went on to run Alfa Romeo's racing for the next two decades.

The TZ is not a famous car outside the hobby and it does not pretend to be. What it has instead is standing inside it. A TZ2 took the Gran Turismo Trophy at the 2009 Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance, which is unusual recognition for a car built purely to race, and the model is a fixture at the Mille Miglia Storica, Le Mans Classic and Goodwood, where the shape does a great deal of work with people who could not name it. Its more interesting cultural role is inside Alfa Romeo itself. This is the car that turned a small consultancy in Udine run by an ex-Ferrari engineer into Autodelta, the department that then produced the GTA, the GTAm and the Tipo 33, and the name Tubolare Zagato has since been recycled twice by Zagato for the TZ3 of 2010 and 2011. Very few racing cars end up naming a lineage that outlives them by half a century.

A TZ is a racing car and rewards being treated as one, which mostly means accepting that it needs attention rather than maintenance. The 1,570cc twin cam is the most robust thing about it, shared in its essentials with tens of thousands of road Alfas, but in race tune with a twin-plug head and high compression it wants regular valve clearances, careful carburettor balance and an oil change measured in hours rather than months. The spaceframe is where the real ownership question lives. It is small-diameter tube, it was built by hand, and most of these cars raced, so distortion and repaired accident damage are common and the aluminium skin hides both. Have the frame measured rather than looked at. The bodywork is hand-formed and thin, and Zagato panels are unavailable in any sense that involves ordering one. Fibreglass on a TZ2 is its own problem, since the original mouldings were laid tight to the chassis and crack around mounting points. Everything under it, though, is Giulia, and that makes daily running far less frightening than the value suggests.