If you are looking for an epic restoration of an old-racing car, Max Banks and the team at Alfaholics are here for you. They are making a great restoration of a championship-winning racing car with a fabulous history.

car
Credit: postwarclassic
How did this restoration initiate?

Max and his father Richard founded a GTA racer in the UK. It was a wonderful initiative of auto parts collected from Alfa’s competition department Autodelta. They took a punt which was the car that won the German Racing Cup in 1974. After research, it is confirmed that the car participated in the German touring car championship. In fact, the old-racing car had a long and busy race career.

old racing car
Credit: classicdriver
Who won this racing car?

The mechanic-turned-race champion Dieter Meyer along with the Hamburg-based Stahlberg team used this racing car. Later Banks found the perfect owner of this car whose name is Alfista Bill Byrne.

Banks said, ‘We wanted to return it to its famous specification and livery from the 1974 season,’ He also added, ‘That would have been quite easy if it was going to be a museum piece. But Bill wanted to go racing. We had to build it to be the best and fastest it could have been, in the period specification, and retaining as much as possible of what we found.’

Bill and Patrick Byrne are the father-and-son race team of Spokane, Washington, USA. They had a long history with Alfa Romeos. Particularly Bill had a deep connection with Giulia GTs and GTVs.

Bill said, ‘I had a friend in college who was drafted to go to Vietnam and he sold me his 1972 GTV when he went. I was dumbfounded at how well it drove – everyone else was driving American muscle – and after he returned and got his car back, I bought one. I wanted to race it but wound up racing a Corvette instead, and over the years I collected many other Italian cars; Ferraris, Maseratis, other Alfas.”

Bill also added, “Then, as my son Patrick was growing up, he got into dirt bikes and was about to move on to a full-size bike when his mother became nervous about broken bones or much worse. I made him a deal – if you sell your bike, we’ll race sports cars.’

racing car
Credit: bhauction
The ultimate results of this restoration

Max Banks performed a mechanical restoration of the car. This restoration was the conundrum of new versus old. Alfaholics supplier completed the engine of the racing car. Banks and his teams concentrated on the rest of the driveline. The experienced racer Banks says, ‘It’s the quickest GTA I’ve driven. It needed so little after its track day – barely nothing more than a wipe-down – we were able to ship it to America a week early.’KNOWLEDGE