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Published on 21 October 2014

Hi Joe, wondering if you can help. I have a 1963 Giulia Sprint 1600, 101 series - basically the beautiful Giulietta Sprint body with the then new Giulia 1600 mechanicals. A previous owner believed that it came to Australia as a new car, via Mildren's - supposedly one of a batch of 6 similar cars brought in together. However, you point out that Mildren sourced his 62-63 model ARs in Italy, rather than through the 'official' importer, Lightburn. I assume he sourced them through the factory there, and not through some other dealer? Where it gets interesting is that my car is one of only two 101 Sprints with a chassis number starting with '38' - all other 101 series 1600 Sprints have a chassis number beginning '35'. AR historical records show that my car was sold to K N Rudd Ltd in the UK on 18 February 1963. Rudd (as Ruddspeed, the famous English tuning works, renowned for fitting the Ford Zephyr 6 into the AC Ace to make the precursor to Shelby's v8 Cobra) had been performing RHD conversions of Alfas for some time, so it is speculated that my car may have been a prototype for a factory-sponsored RHD conversion program. (My car's 38-prefix sister went to Thompson & Taylor, UK Alfa main dealers, around the same time early in 1963. At that time Thompson & Taylor were on the Alfa factory's case to build RHD versions of several of the current LHD-only Alfas.) My car has a moulded fibreglass dash, rather than the cut-&-shut metal usually used. The moulding was obviously done very professionally, by Miles Structural & Marine Plastics (Miles built aeroplanes, boats etc), so that would tally with the proposition that my car was a prototype for a serious RHD conversion program. The first record I have of my car in Australia is a receipt from Geohegan & Sons, Ashfield (yes, the racing Geohegans) dated late 1966 for the sale of the car to the chap I bought it from (he sold it in 1970, then bought it again in 1996). It was secondhand, with NSW reg EFP164. I have a photo showing the car with that rego plate. So the car obviously arrived in Australia sometime before late 66. I wonder whether there's any way of tracing my car's history between the early 63 delivery to Ruddspeed in the UK and its sale by Geohegans in late 66? Did any early AR records survive from Mildren's? There's obviously a story with the car, as AR reserved special chassis numbers only for special projects. It would be great to fill in the gaps.