Look at the original Alfa Romeo ad for the Giulietta Turbodelta and there's a military fighter jet parked on the tarmac behind it. That was the pitch. This car was built to go war on the track, and they needed to sell 500 road-legal examples to put it on a GT grid. They built 361 before they ran out of buyers and pulled the plug on the homologation program. The Turbodelta never raced. Every car they made went home with a private owner, and Massimo owns number 117.
One of 361 cars doesn't come up on the usual auction sites, and the ones that do come with questions nobody wants to answer in a listing. The runners move through people who still remember what the car was supposed to be. Massimo worked through that network for years before he found his, and when he drives it now, he isn't thinking about the road. "I think back to everything that was the search for this car," he says. "The people I have known, the engineers who have worked on it, its history, the assemblers."
He's had Alfa on the brain his whole life. Alfa toys as a kid, in a country where police drove Alfas and so did the people they were chasing. He followed the name as he got older and ran into Autodelta, Alfa's racing skunkworks, which was run by ex-Ferrari engineer Carlo Chiti. Chiti built small strange cars in between Formula 1 programs. The Turbodelta was one of the last ones, and by the time Massimo was old enough to buy his own Alfa, an Autodelta was the one he wanted.
The base Giulietta was already peculiar before Autodelta touched it. Ermanno Cressoni, an architect by training, was running Alfa's Centro Stile when the second-generation car was designed in the late '70s. He put the power window switches up near the roofline like helicopter overhead panels, and dropped an oval instrument pod into the middle of the dashboard like a UFO set down on the upholstery. Magnesium wheels came standard. "To make something this unique," Massimo says, "you need creativity, but with a pinch of madness." Then Autodelta bolted on a turbocharger and called it a racing car.
The car is rear-wheel drive with a rear transaxle and no electronic aids of any kind. "You have to be careful," Massimo says, "but not of the car. You have to be careful of yourself." The sound of the engine on full throttle is enough to make him leave the radio off.
"After a hard day at work," he says, "I come down to the garage and look at the Giulietta, I spend time with it, check the oil, the tire pressure. It makes me feel better." 
