fine crowd of over thirty people turned out for AONE’s first-ever tech session at AlphaCars on Sunday, August 14th. AlphaCars is a foreign car sales and service facility in Boxborough, MA that, as you’ve surely noticed, has been an AONE sponsor for over a year now. This was our chance to see what they’re all about!

The AlphaCars digs is a big, modern, airy, clean, bright establishment, the likes to which most of us are unaccustomed. It comprises a showroom (they deal mostly in late-model European vehicles), nine service bays, offices, a parts area, and conference center. Lots of glass and oak woodwork make for pleasant surroundings. Computers abound, reflecting their high-tech approach to things automotive. The business is operated with nine employees.

Dmitry Bykhovsky is the AlphaCars owner, but we were delighted to learn that he’s also an Alfa owner! In fact, Alfas are his favorite ride—he proudly showed us his lovely red GTV 2000 sitting in one of the bays. When asked about the blatant misspelling of AlphaCars, he logically replied that, while he’d have liked to name it AlfaCars, it might have limited his business a bit, and he decided to go with a less marque-specific option. Fair enough, Dmitry!

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. At around noon (give or take) on a very hot Sunday in the middle of one of this season’s nastiest heat waves, our gang arrived, one Alfa after the next. Once again, people showed up from New Hampshire, Vermont, and Rhode Island (as well as Massachusetts, of course). As is our wont, we hung around outside for a while in the torrid air, getting reacquainted and checking out each other’s macchina. Only when we filed inside did we realize our mistake—AlphaCars is blissfully air conditioned!

Dmitry and a few other members of his staff welcomed us warmly, and we held an informal club meeting around a couple of tables they’d set up for us. Kevin Murphy chaired the proceedings, which mainly centered on our plans for attending the Lime Rock Vintage Festival over Labor Day weekend and the big Alfacentric Watkins Glen fiesta the weekend after.

Then Dmitry took us on a tour of the AlphaCars facilities. "Expect to be impressed" is the slogan that appears in their promotional material, and it’s safe to say that it’s not just hype! One would be hard-pressed to find a shop that exuded such an air of professionalism. The tour ended with the tech session portion of the day, wherein Dmitry gave us an extensive talk on pre-purchase car inspections. This was highlighted by some great info on how to detect damage that cars might have suffered and how to determine whether such damage, if it exists, was repaired in an acceptable manner. He had us all running our fingertips across the body seams of an AMG Mercedes (good thing no one was watching).

At this point, the pizza arrived! We all shuffled out to the showroom (where, incidentally, Rod Burdick’s Sprint Speciale and John Meister’s GTV had been ensconced for the day—it nearly brought a tear to the eye to see Alfas in a showroom again!). The affair finally wound up as we chewed the pizza and chewed the fat, and eventually trundled off in our various directions. It was nice to discover that the day had cooled off by the time we left, although many of us had to flip our tops up in order to slog through the scattered thunderstorms that had cropped up.