Final Parking Space: 1987 Alfa Romeo Spider
We’ve seen a trio of Italian cars in this series: two Fiats and a Maserati. Alfa Romeo deserves our junkyard respect as well, so here’s this Series 3 Spider in once-glorious Rosso Alfa paint I found in a San Francisco Bay Area car graveyard over the summer.
The build tag was pried off long ago, but the VIN on the firewall tells me it’s definitely an ’87. The adhesive shadow for the pried-off badge on the right side of the decklid spoiler is the right shape and location for the mid-grade Spider Veloce for that year.
However, it has leather seats with red stitching, so it could be a top-trim-level Spider Quadrifoglio with a decklid swap. It might even be a base-grade Spider Graduate with lots of parts swaps. This car was in an Oakland junkyard, and the East Bay is a notorious hotbed for Alfa Romeo fanatics, most of whom own a dozen parts cars apiece and build cut-and-paste Spider projects all the time. For these reasons, I’m not going to identify this car as any one of the three possible U.S.-market 1987 Spider trim levels, because I think it’s a mashup of 19 cars.
I’m an old East Bay cat, grew up a couple of miles from this Spider’s final parking space, so plenty of those Alfa fanatics are my friends from way back. That includes Berkeley’s own Conrad Stevenson (shown here working on his 1939 6C 2500 at his shop, a decade ago), who managed to build a pretty quick Spider for the 24 Hours of Lemons out of leftover parts he found in the weeds—literally!—behind his shop. I can think of another half-dozen guys in the area who could whomp together a drivable ’70s/’80s/’90s Spider from parts on hand plus a C-note if given a couple days’ warning.
In fact, when I put the word out about this car among that crew, the responses were mostly along the lines of, “I have more parts than I need already and no room for more, want some?”
Still, someone had already grabbed the passenger door by the time I arrived, and I’m sure it has been picked completely clean (and, given that I shot these photos in June, probably crushed and its shell shredded and shipped to Guangzhou from the nearby Port of Oakland) by the time of this writing.
If this is the original engine (which is theoretically possible but I wouldn’t bet on it given the fact that so many Spider owners have spare engines stacked like cordwood), it’s a 2.0-liter rated at 115 horsepower and 119 pound-feet.
There was no factory automatic transmission available for the 1987 Spider (it was possible to get one as an option in U.S.-market Spiders for the 1991 through 1993 model years), so this is the five-speed manual that was standard in these cars going back to the 1960s.
The appearance and basic design of the Spider didn’t change tremendously from the early 1970s through its end in 1993, so these iconic cars are instantly identifiable at a glance. They make great projects now, since they can be made respectably quick and parts are readily available. This one was a little too far gone to have been an economically justifiable restoration, unfortunately.
The Alfa Spider was much more expensive than such semi-competitors as the MG MGB, Fiat 124 Sport Spider, and Triumph TR7 during the Malaise Era, being more powerful and generally better-screwed-together than those cars. Its pricing was more in line with the Chevrolet Corvette and Jensen-Healey during that period.
For 1987, the MSRP of the Alfa Romeo Spider was $14,500 (Graduate), $17,195 (Veloce), or $21,000 (Quadrifoglio), or about $41,161/$48,812/$59,613 in 2024 dollars). Meanwhile, a new 1987 Corvette convertible listed at $33,172 ($94,166 now), though that car stopped being a true Alfa Spider rival the moment the C4 version was born.
Cars that might have rivaled this one for enthusiast sales in 1987 included the Mazda RX-7 Turbo ($20,399), BMW 325 ($21,475), Mitsubishi Starion Turbo ($18,109), Porsche 924S ($22,995), Toyota Supra ($20,490), and maybe even the Ford Mustang GT convertible ($15,724). In truth, though, there were no genuine Alfa Spider rivals left by the late 1980s; most people who bought these cars by that time knew what they wanted from the start.
Alfa Romeo stuck around in the United States market after Spider production ended, and even after MG, Triumph, Rover, Fiat, Lancia, Citroën, Peugeot, Renault, and even Daihatsu had given up on us. The final new Alfas sold here (prior to the marque’s return in 2015, that is) were 164s, which were imported through 1995.
By the time this car was built, Alfa Romeo had been taken over by Fiat (joining erstwhile rival Lancia). Once production of the original Alfa Spider ended, Fiat-owned Alfa Lancia Industriale S.P.A. was free to design a new Spider on a front-wheel-drive platform developed for many models in the Alfa Romeo/Lancia/Fiat lineups. That car was built through 2006, after which it was replaced with yet another front-drive Alfa Romeo Spider based on a platform developed in partnership with Saab (and I’ve managed to find one of those Spiders during my global junkyard travels).
After you’ve gone through all the reasons not to buy an Alfa Romeo Spider, two compelling facts remain: it’s summer… and it’s an Alfa Romeo. Makes sense to me!
Sad to see that thing rotting like that.
It’s the Fletch car! As a midwesterner, what shocks me is the rust free condition of many of the cars you feature. Cars that are absolutely viable project cars here are just junk where you roam. Must be nice.
I took some parts from this car, including footwell lighting, gauge cluster, wing window, and headlight buckets. I didn’t realize how rarely these come up in junkyards but I haven’t found another since.
“You with the cops?”
“As far as you know!”
Never saw Fletch. Is that Melanie Griffith?
Yeah – a bitsa. ‘87 engine should have the vvt solenoid on the front top of the engine. This has the controls for a/c. Standard for a Veloce, but could be added to a Graduate, the red stitching on the leather seats would mean they came from a Quad.
A family friend has a non-investment grade ’87 Veloce that gets driven. It has its charm. Having been produced since Dustin Hoffman was knee-high to a grasshopper, even by ’87 these were a lovely anachronism, in the Italian style. For some reason the speedo needle doesn’t go to zero when the car is stopped (the one pictured here isn’t an anomaly), the fuel gauge is undamped so it jumps around as you accelerate, brake, and turn. Ancillary controls are located and operated contrary to convention, the shifter is long and bends somewhere past the dashboard, requiring a firm hand, a long throw, and patience on the upshift. The unassisted steering is heavy and has a slow ratio by modern standards.
Again, it’s retro-charming, but the Miata, which came out 2 or 3 years later, was a much more modern affair. It didn’t have the Alfa’s flair, roomy trunk, or full-sized spare, nor are the early ones more powerful, but I find it to go down a winding country road with much more confidence. I throw my ’99 around with a reckless abandon that I wouldn’t dare with the Spider.
I’d probably choose the Alfa to pick up a girl in a sundress for a summer picnic, though.
Pie – In their prime – Anne Bancroft or Katharine Ross?
Could be a VERY LOW INITIAL investment for building a vintage racer. You’d have to strip it down beyond this point anyway. What matters is that the tub and most body panels are solid.