Check out the story of this Alfa Romeo GTV6’s racing return

By Simon Charlesworth

| 5 Oct 2026

Classic & Sports Car – Alfa Romeo GTV6 touring car: return to the track

The Alfa Romeo swoops back into the pit garage.

Temperature and pressure readings are quickly taken across the tread and shoulders of each wheel. The data is relayed.

“It’s still very cold on the outer shoulder of that side tyre,” says Richard Melvin, before reeling off a series of figures.

We’re at a track day at Thruxton race track, in Hampshire, UK, with Chris Snowdon Racing.

In addition to Chris himself, there’s his colleague Rich and a Group 1 Alfa Romeo GTV6 – an alumnus of the British Saloon Car Championship from 1982-’85.

Fast-forward 40 years and the car showed great promise at the 82nd Goodwood Members’ Meeting, before fate bounced a valve in the V6.

Around 240bhp, 130mph, rear-wheel drive and crossply tyres – driving this Alfa Romeo GTV6 quickly requires a certain finesse

As the Win Percy Trophy at the 83rd meeting (18-19 April 2026) loomed, the team was in fault-finding and fixing mode.

Yes, the suspension is all Rose-jointed and rubber-free, while springs and anti-roll bars have been uprated, especially the front torsion bars, and the Alfa benefits from CSR’s own dampers thanks to working with Quantum to develop bespoke valving.

However, because these Group 1 cars fall outside Goodwood’s pre-1970 Motorsport UK track licence, they must run on treaded crossplies.

Today, therefore, is all about honing the GTV6’s handling in preparation for Chris and his returning co-driver, Tiff Needell, to hopefully deliver on last year’s promising pace.

Honing this restored Alfa Romeo GTV6 racer for Goodwood was a labour of love

This car was originally raced by the late Jon Dooley and the Napolina Alfa Romeo Dealer Team (ARDT) in the 1982 BSCC (precursor to the British Touring Car Championship), while Bob Dove prepared the Group 1 GTV6 and Michael Lindsay was the team manager.

Dooley had owned Alfa Romeo cars at university, but when he became financial controller at Alfa Romeo GB he went racing privately.

In 1975, Lindsay and Leo Bertorelli formed the ARDT, and in 1976 Dooley raced for them in the BSCC with an Alfasud.

He later moved up to an Alfetta GTV 2000, but in 1981 he won the 1300cc class in his Alfasud ti – snaffling the title from the works-backed opposition in the final race.

The Alfa Romeo GTV6’s businesslike interior includes a battle-scarred transmission tunnel, through which the flywheel once escaped at speed

Dooley campaigned the GTV6 2.5 for a very mixed 1982.

The 1983 season, when Group 1 became Group A, proved to be rather disappointing and was peppered with non-finishes, but ’84 was better, with Dooley winning Class B while securing third place in the drivers’ championship.

In 1985, further retirements ruined the season, then in ’86 teammate Rob Kirby competed in the first race in Dooley’s old GTV6, before both drivers undertook the rest of the season aboard Alfa Romeo 75s powered by GTV6 2.5-litre engines.

The turbocharged motors then arrived, and these cars continued to compete in 1987 – until Kirby suffered a bad accident and subsequently retired from racing.

“You can’t hang the tail out because it won’t come back. You have to be more clinical”

Rich bought the GTV6 from its former driver in 2010, when he was after spares for another ARDT car and had been told about Dooley’s parts haul.

He says: “He had these chicken sheds that were full of cars. He was always saying that he was going to go through his stuff and he would let me know… He never did!

“I saw him at Mallory Park in about 2009 and he said he had finally done that list. ‘Bloody hell,’ I said, ‘Really? Can I have a look?’

“I noticed the GTV6 and asked if it was the Napolina car, because by then it had been painted white due to its John West sponsorship for its final season.

“It was, and he wanted to sell it to me, but it was an absolute wreck.”

This Alfa Romeo GTV6 racing car’s Stack tachometer

“We started doing the restoration at CSR: I got it to a painted shell, with all the race items ready to go into the car, and that was a major task because you just can’t get parts for these,” explains Rich.

“That was half the reason why we now supply bits for these racers, because I had to go and make them, doing both this and my ex-Hilliard Bertorelli Group 2 Alfetta GTV 2000.

“We had to replace the roof because it had rotted.

“Jon crashed into a beet field in 1985 during a sponsors’ day. He rolled it with someone paying to be passenger…

“They had sort of straightened it out, but all that damage meant it had started rotting.”

The Alfa Romeo GTV6’s 2.5-litre, 12-valve Busso motor sounds fantastic

“So we replaced the roof and some of the floors, and the rear panel was horrible,” he continues.

“The transmission tunnel still has all of the jacking marks from the period.

“There’s even a load of plating on the tunnel from when the flywheel parted company with the engine and decided to come into the cabin when Jon was driving at Silverstone.

“We have left all of that in; it’s still all on the car.

“Mostly it’s still original, it just needed a lot of patching and welding.”

During the Alfa Romeo’s comeback event at Goodwood’s 82nd Members’ Meeting, that bounced valve during qualifying left the team with an overnight repair to complete.

The Alfa Romeo GTV6 has an adjustable Watt linkage on the rear – note the transaxle and inboard brakes, too

But the result was a lack of power – and they ran out of petrol.

The fuel in question was of the new sustainable variety, which CSR found to be consumed more eagerly than its usual tipple.

Throw in an unexpected safety car – which extended the Win Percy Trophy race by three laps – and the car spluttered to a halt.

“So we are back this year with a load of changes to the car,” continues Rich. “We have improved some of the bits we hadn’t got around to last year.

“Hopefully it has better handling and hopefully it has better brakes, because the stoppers were woeful – they’re standard brakes, absolutely standard.

“It’s part of the Group 1 rules, so you have a lot of car with 240bhp, doing 130mph and you’re braking on those little Brembos and twin-pot calipers. It does not like stopping.”

Long-term storage had left the Alfa Romeo GTV6 in a sorry state, so its shell had to be fully restored, including fitting a new roof

Chris adds: “The standard front brakes take quite a bit of playing around with to get them to actually work: pedal pressures, line pressures and pad materials.”

Over the winter, the 2.5-litre, 12-valve Busso V6 was rebuilt and installed.

“It is running high-compression pistons, it has got standard-size valves and it’s running relatively high-lift cams and duration,” says Rich.

“All the usual goodies are in there. We’re limited with what you can do with valve sizes, and you have to keep the same displacement, but we’re getting around 230-240bhp with this engine revving to about 8000rpm.

“We do build more powerful engines – you can get about 250-255bhp out of them before reliability is affected.”

The Alfa Romeo GTV6’s pedals are for function not form

There are three problems with transaxle Alfa Romeos: understeer, power loss and the aforementioned poor brakes on British, right-hand-drive cars.

When the 1972 Alfetta was launched, much was made about its 50:50 weight distribution and its low polar moment of inertia.

What soon became evident was that, while the de Dion transaxle rear of this all-new Alfa Romeo had been perfectly sorted out, the same wasn’t true of the front end’s torsion bars, double wishbones and anti-roll bar.

Luckily, the front was totally adjustable for camber and castor, and uprated torsion bars and anti-roll bars soon became available.

This Alfa Romeo GTV6’s purposeful stance

The power-loss issue via the inefficient transaxle, though, was more of a bugbear for motorsport purposes.

“We’ve got needle-roller bearings in the gearbox throughout, so there is slightly less friction through the close-ratio gearbox,” says Rich.

“Straight-tooth gears help transmit the power, but they are quite noisy, they get hot and they do eat power.

“The twin-plate clutch has been replaced by an uprated, single-plate 3-litre Alfa 75 V6 unit with paddle clutch plates.

“It has a limited-slip differential, and we’re running a propshaft with a CV joint at either end in an effort to make it run a bit more smoothly.”

The Napolina Alfa Romeo Dealer Team paintwork replicates Jon Dooley’s 1982 BSCC livery

“Once you do that, the amount of vibration that is transmitted down the propshaft to the clutch housing means we have to have a special housing,” Rich explains.

“We now make them, using the original pattern, as they were in the 1980s for the ARDT.”

While the transaxle’s appetite for power has been curtailed as effectively as it can be, understeer is always an issue.

The Busso V6 is far heavier than the four-pot twin-cam originally fitted to the Alfetta berlina and its shorter-wheelbase Alfetta GT/V twin, which meant that it no longer enjoyed perfect weight distribution or such swift, nimble and balanced handling.

The Alfa Romeo GTV6 can be a fickle thing to set up, and it’s always a compromise

No, a roadgoing GTV6’s chassis, due to its much greater nose weight, is more akin to a rear-drive machine with a conventional drivetrain.

It is softer, heavier and slower than one of its more powerful – typically by 80-100bhp – competition siblings.

“As a racing car it is great,” enthuses Rich, “naturally carrying speed through corners and getting the power down really well, thanks to the transaxle and its de Dion rear.

“The propshaft and gearbox, though, tend to be the car’s weak points in terms of reliability.

“This is due to the propshaft turning at engine speed, and that also puts a lot of stress on the clutch housing.

“These Alfas also have a gearchange that is slower than ideal, too.”

This Alfa racer’s cabin vent

More sophisticated than a Ford, then?

“Yes,” says Rich. “It won’t drift like a Capri. You can’t hang the tail out because it won’t come back due to its weight distribution – and these crossply tyres.

“Approach the point of no return and it’s far sharper than a normal rear-drive car.

“The cornering speed is quicker, but it’s more of a knife-edge on the limit.

“The limit is further out, but it is narrower and you’ll hit a point where it’ll pendulum and go.

“You have to be more clinical and precise with how you drive. Capris and Escorts are slidey; this isn’t.”

Away from the BSCC, Dany Snobeck and Alain Cudini won the Championnat de France des Voitures de Production in 1983 and ’84, and the GTV6 achieved success in Division Two of the European Touring Car Championship.

Braking is marginal on track, and the Alfa Romeo GTV6 is on a knife edge at the limit

The Alfa Romeo won D2 for four successive years (1982-’85) in the hands of Alfa Romeo Deutschland, Luigi Racing, Scuderia Autoldi Corse, Jolly Club Milano, Imberti and Biesse Racing Team.

Back to today at Thruxton race track, and Chris explains: “We don’t want the car to bounce around here. You could increase the rear bump, but Thruxton is quite a bouncy circuit.

“So it’s quite settled at the moment, and we’re just playing with the front-end shock settings and tyre pressures to try and get the car to grip a bit more at the nose, to get it to bite more.

“It’s a balancing act: we haven’t got double-adjustable dampers on the car, because we’re not allowed them.”

This classic touring car’s dials

“We’ve only got single adjustables, which are proportional for bump and rebound, so we just rolled the front shocks off and it got a lot better,” he continues.

“Ideally we’d like more rebound at the front. At the moment we’re taking a little bit of air out of the front to try and reduce the tyre temperature difference across the carcass.

“Also, we need to get the temperature up on the outer shoulder.

“If we can soften it further, so the middle of the tyre deforms more, that will stop the carcass from rolling – and that should lead to more temperature on the outer edges.”

Adjustments made, Chris and the GTV6 head out on to the circuit again to mix it with the modern track-day machinery.

This Alfa Romeo GTV6’s gold Compomotive wheel

As the Alfa leaves the pitlane to join Britain’s fastest track, the howl of the Busso motor is unmistakable.

Amid the modern four-cylinder engines already circulating the race track, the V6 sounds like opera singer Maria Callas in full voice in a football crowd, and makes goosebumps erupt everywhere.

The ‘pit, adjust and return’ routine is repeated several times in the battle with understeer. Soon, though, we have run out of time and the journey back home beckons.

Chris reckons that all the changes they have made during this intense session have been positive and, crucially, they have avoided any retrograde steps.

This Alfa Romeo’s tricolour is interrupted by the fuel filler

“It’s chalk and cheese compared with how it was at the end of last year,” he says, reflecting on the positive changes made and how much the car has improved.

“It is still understeering, but if we cure the understeer here, I think we’ll be in trouble at Goodwood, so we’re going to leave it alone.

“It actually seems to be quite nice to drive this way.

“It doesn’t understeer when you’re on the brakes, but that’s the way you drive a GTV6: you transfer all of the weight forward and it turns in, but it’s not turning in around the fast stuff because I think it’s just tyre-limited.

“We’re coming out of the corners quite well now.”

Making this historic Alfa Romeo GTV6 touring car competitive again hasn’t been easy

Rich concludes: “I think we might need to go stiffer on the front anti-roll bar, but we had someone do some analytics on the suspension.

“There has always been a traditional way to set these cars up. These guys pointed us in a new direction.

“We’ve always been a bit sceptical, but every time we try something, they happen to be right. This is slightly annoying!

“They did say we needed a bigger front anti-roll bar; there’s a huge one on there now.”

Eager to see just how competitive Goodwood racers are – and with a cheeky glimmer of schadenfreude – I ask just how thick that anti-roll bar is.

“Crikey,” exclaims Rich with a laugh, “I can’t tell you that! What are you on about?”

So that means ‘very’, then…

At the 83rd Goodwood Members’ Meeting from 18-19 April 2026, Tiff Needell came home 20th in part one of the Win Percy Trophy, Chris Snowdon 15th in part two, for a combined result of 14th

Images: Jack Harrison

Thanks to: CSR Racing; Javelin Trackdays; John Haylett at Thruxton Circuit

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