Alfa Romeo Spider Series 3

Everything people argue about on a Series 3 lives at the two ends. The 1983 facelift left the 1966 midsection completely alone, the scalloped flanks and low shield grille and cockpit proportion Pininfarina had put there seventeen years earlier, and went after the bumpers instead. The front became a single black plastic assembly with the grille built into it and a deep valance below, genuinely better resolved than the bolted-on rubber blocks American law had forced onto the car through the seventies. The back got larger lamps, a cleaner bumper, and the ducktail. That ducktail is the argument. It started as a soft foam rubber blade on the bootlid and became hard black plastic in 1986 so it could carry a third brake light, and the car has been called the rubber tail ever since, not always kindly. Quadrifoglio cars piled sideskirts and their own spoilers on top of it, along with 15 inch alloys, in the most 1980s way imaginable. Nobody at Pininfarina is individually credited for the work, which was studio rather than signature. The Series 4 of 1990 deleted the ducktail entirely, which tells you what the design house eventually made of it.

There is no racing record here, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Alfa Romeo's competition energy in the 1980s went into Formula One and into touring cars built on other platforms, not into a seventeen-year-old roadster it was updating to satisfy emissions law. The Spider's own competition history is real but earlier and amateur: Paul Spruell's 1750 Spider Veloce took three SCCA E Production national championships, including a 1988 win at Road Atlanta from eleventh on the grid that earned the Mark Donohue Award, but that was an old-bodied car first raced at Sebring in 1969, not a Series 3. What the Series 3 inherited instead is the hardware: the same twin cam architecture, the same all-synchro five-speed, the same suspension thinking that made Autodelta's coupes so effective in period. That is why these cars still turn up at club track days and on vintage rallies doing exactly what the family has always done well, with proven parts and friendly limits. The trophies belong to the coupes and to the older Spiders. This one earns its keep on Sunday mornings.

The Spider that Dustin Hoffman drove belongs to another page. The Series 3 has its own eighties file, smaller but not empty. In Fletch, in 1985, Chevy Chase commandeers an ivory 1983 Spider Veloce and takes it across Los Angeles in the film's best-remembered sequence. Three years later Michelle Pfeiffer drives a 1986 2000 Spider Veloce through Tequila Sunrise. Both are exactly the car this page is about, ducktail and all, and both cast it the same way: the slightly impractical Italian convertible belonging to somebody with better taste than money. Alfa Romeo worked the older association harder. When it needed a cheap American entry model in 1985 it named the car the Graduate, after the 1967 film, and sold it under that name until 1990. It is a strange piece of marketing when you look at it directly, a company selling its bumper-law facelift on the memory of a boat-tailed car two decades gone. It also worked well enough that the name outlived the series it was attached to.

The body is the money and the drivetrain is the reward. These are monocoque cars, so corrosion in the floors, sills, arches and spare wheel well is structural work rather than cosmetic, and the most valuable habit an owner can have is keeping the car dry and the hood in good order. Everything else is comparatively cheerful. The all-alloy twin cam weeps a little oil as a matter of temperament and will run for decades doing it. Second gear synchros buzz when you hurry them, and always have. The Bosch L-Jetronic that replaced SPICA on North American cars from 1982 is the friendliest fuel system the Spider ever had: well documented, widely understood, and not dependent on a shrinking population of specialists who still know a mechanical injection pump. The eighties electrics have their moments, usually flickering warning lights traced back to lazy earth connections rather than anything expensive. Soft tops wear out, seat bolsters wear out, and both are replaceable without drama. Hagerty rates these among the more novice-friendly cars of their era to work on. What owners report is a car that starts, drives and charms every weekend, provided somebody dealt with the rust before they arrived.