The sun has been out in Zurich lately which makes for a nice change, given it was very far away during most of summer. This obviously means that some classic car owners have used the occasion to get their machines before winter kicks in, so in that spirit, it was a nice surprise to walk out of the office door last week and see… an Alfa Romeo Montreal! It certainly doesn’t happen often, and as can be seen below, it was also a Montreal in very nice condition.

To start with the not very Italian name, why on earth did Alfa name the car after a town in Québec? The simple explanation is that it was first shown at the world exhibition in 1967 in, you guessed it, Montreal, and Alfa apparently had no better name in mind than that. Production started three years later in 1970, ending in 1977. The beautiful coupé was designed by our old friend Marcello Gandini of Bertone, and the most striking feature is certainly the headlight covers that flip back when you turn them on.

After the headlights, it’s really the side air intakes that catch your attention and makes you think the Montreal has a mid-mounted engine. Perhaps strangely, it never did so and whereas there were indeed plans for it when the original design was developed, when the project moved on, Alfa settled on a more conventional front engine. The air intakes were however kept to help cool the cabin, and probably also because they look cool.

The engine may be in the front, but it clearly remains the highlight of the car. The four-cam, eight-cylinder motor had been developed for the Tipo 33, a previous Alfa racing car. At 2.6 litres it was quite small but still developed 200 hp, but did so using quite a lot of fuel which wasn’t ideal in the early 70’s, as we’ll come back to. As for the rest of the car, as so often over the years, Alfa was a bit short on cash, so the chassis and brakes both come from the Giulia GT, meaning they were a bit under-dimensioned, especially given the potent engine. In other words acceleration was better than braking, so staying up in front was a good idea!

Even though the Montreal interior doesn’t reach the heights of some other Italian legends from Modena or Sant’Agata from the period, it’s nice enough and ties back to the GT car tradition from the 70’s. But just like many others among those, the Montreal also drove straight into the 1973-1974 oil crisis, which certainly didn’t help sales numbers. In seven years of production, Alfa would only build around 4.000 Montreals in total, certainly much less than the company had initially hoped for.

For some reason, Montreals survived corrosion better than many other 70’s cars, and certainly better than most other Alfas. This in turn means that finding a nice one today isn’t as difficult as you would have thought. As in so many cases, buying one five-six years ago had been far cheaper, with nice cars now trading around EUR 60-80.000. Although it’s easy to love the design and even more so with a V8 under the hood, at that price level there are a bit too many interesting competitors for me to be swayed by the Canadian Alfa, but that’s only me!