Saturday, April 15 was cool, dark and wet as I first laid eyes on the road outside my living room window that morning. Good thing I wasn’t to leave for three hours yet; maybe the weatherman’s promise of a decent day would at least dry the roads before I left my garage for the ride up to KTR Motorsports in Ayer, Massachusetts, about 40 miles distant. It had taken all week to dry my Spider’s floors, insulation, mats and every possible nook and cranny after our ride through mile after mile of standing water and sheeting rain at the Cape Codders Courageous rally the Saturday before, so I wasn’t ready to do that again.

Fortunately, Ma Nature smiled upon the Alfa Owners this weekend, and at 10am I left on nearly dry roads, picked up my pal Joe Salvucci on the way, and headed north-northwest toward KTR. Joe is a tool-and-die man by trade and loves to check out places like KTR, where people have fun doing the kind of precision machine work Joe has spent half a lifetime perfecting. We got off the highway after about 20 miles and went over typical early spring back roads, finally coming up behind Dave and Vi Pratt at the route 2A rotary near the Ayer line.

KTR has a very large building set well back from Route 2A and, as we pulled up to it, the welcome sun came out and we parked in a line with (among other cars) a Jag XK120 racer, an Austin Healey 100 that looked freshly restored, and some modern, racy-looking grand tourer that we quickly learned was the new Noble M12. Greeting us just inside the door was Tom Letourneau, the guy who had organized this whole event. Inside, the showroom was stuffed with a few more very interesting cars—but it’s hard to call them “cars”—they were more like icons. Dino 246GT from the early 70’s. A real (yes real) Shelby AC Cobra, with Le Mans racing history; a real (there’s that word again) Ferrari GTO, which still bore its original paint cracking everywhere, racetrack numbers and scars. And then there was this really jewel-like Giulietta Sprint, owned by 70’s rocker J. Geils. I’d never seen one restored and detailed so well (we did learn that there was really a 2 litre under the hood, as J. likes to hot-rod his cars where it won’t show). The Ferrari and the Cobra were owned by vintage racer Sandra McNeil, of whom I will surely take notice the next time I am at such an event—this woman has fantastic taste in automobiles!

We wandered into the shop areas, taking care to mop up our drool every now and then as we went from vintage racer to race motors on stands in the middle of being prepped to vintage sports and GT cars in for work or just storage for their owners. After an hour or so we sat down to lunch—a buffet-style setup that included a delicious array of clam chowder, chili, assorted wrap sandwiches, dessert, coffee, and soft drinks. We then listened to a presentation by Paul Wilson and Roger Cassin on the new Noble M12 GTO-3. Just for the fun of it, Roger, who owned one of the Noble cars present, drew two names from a hat, the winners to get rides in the Noble. Naturally, I won (which is how I got elected to write this story). The car is very fast, of course (it has six forward speeds and a button to jump to warp-speed) but the real news about the car is that, although the body comes as a roller from Superformance in South Africa, it is powered by a U.S.-sourced Ford Duratec engine boosted by twin turbos, and the whole package comes in at under $100K. Which sounds like a lot until you look at similarly performing Porsche GT3s and Ferrari Enzos. Besides getting from 0 to 60 in 3.7 seconds, it also corners like a Lotus, and the suspension soaks up the rough back roads like you were driving on a sheet of glass. Simply amazing, as was Roger’s driving in Route 2A traffic.

Before my ride in the Noble, we were treated to a demo of KTR’s new dynamometer, which gave us quite a show with a Giulietta Spider racecar hooked up—what a sweet sound a Giulietta at 8200 RPM makes! And what an advantage to be able to check out, via computer hookup, just how your car is performing at various engine speeds.

Finally, the reality of the event coming to a close was upon us, and after a few more photos I hopped back into the Spider and headed south. I must admit that my speed was up; whatever the Spider could do on 2A seemed like a walking pace compared to my ride in the Noble, but eventually I fell back to earth and under the radar (almost). Our thanks go out to Tom Letourneau, Roger Cassin, Paul Wilson, and the KTR staff! We had a terrific turnout of over 40 Alfisti for this event—when do we do it again?

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	The upstairs loft houses dozens of sports cars, most of them vintage racers and including a respectable number of Alfas
	The cars outside in the parking lot were pretty darn nice too. Hey, wait—those are ours!
	The crowd gathers for lunch around tables set up in one of the shops
	Paul Wilson describing the many virtues of the Noble M12, an example of which rests behind him with its clamshell body open
	The Noble M12’s styling subtly suggests its performance capabilities
	Roger Cassin (L) and Paul Wilson educate us on the Noble’s attributes with understandable exuberance
	We get a demonstration of KTR’s new computerized four-wheel chassis dyno, with a test vehicle appropriate for our group
	J. Geils’s Sprint and the other fabulous cars in the showroom are ignored by Alfisti watching reruns of The Simpsons on the showroom’s TV
	Another couple of views of J. Geils's Sprint, inside and out
	KTR Motorsports will work on anything!

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