One of the coolest cars at the 24 Hours of LeMons race at Altamont was #99, the 1971 Alfa Romeo Spider built and operated by Team Ecurie Ecrappe. This aerodynamically optimized Italian machine did very well at first, leading the pack for a while on the first day, but mechanical woes put it in 52nd place by the time the race ended. But that's not all there is to the story- it turns out Ecurie Ecrappe entered the car in the prestigious Concorso Italiano car show, where (we hope) it scandalized the date-coded, numbers-matching crowd.
Team member and fellow East Bay gearhead TheEastBayKid has this to say:
With your ongoing LeMons coverage, I thought you might be interested in our team's trip to Concorso Italiano with our LeMons car. The standards for that event are surprisingly un-hard to meet—you go online, and they ask for year, make, model, and color. Our entry read like this:
1971
Alfa Romeo
Spider
Black
We raced the car in July, showed it at Concorso, and raced it again in October. It's probably going to Thunderhill, too. I work for Jay, but run with an independent team, Ecurie Ecrappe. I still feel a responsibility to lead by example, so instead of getting a CRX or 80s BMW like everyone else, our team got the worst Alfa we could find. Makes the Cal Mille Alfetta look like a trailer queen.
The car has a trunk-mounted Honda radiator and a Ferrari 512S-inspired aero package.
Check out the incredibly well-documented story of the car's build here (seriously, check it out- far too much beautiful junkyard engineering for me to describe in this post), and then take a look at #99 wowing the Ferrari purists at Concorso Italiano in Monterey here. See the gallery below for my action shots at the October Altamont LeMons race.