[One day a few weeks ago, Steve Silverstein (among other things an avid collector of vintage car magazines) stumbled across a classified ad in a very old Road & Track for a Giulietta Sprint Zagato being offered for sale by one G. Fogg (click the thumbnail below to see the ad). I wondered whether it might be the same SZ that belongs to Bob Russell and graced the cover of our April issue, and sure enough it was! So Bob sent in the article below and some accompanying photos. George, by the way, is still an AONE member and owns several wonderful classic Alfas.—Ed.]

in my teens and early twenties, I was very interested in sports cars and racing. I read all of the issues of Road & Track, learning about many cars which, at that time, I couldn’t afford and could only dream about.

One of the cars that caught my imagination was the Alfa Romeo Giulietta Sprint Zagato, on which Road & Track did a road test in 1961. The car was beautiful in its tight aluminum hand-formed skin and Spartan interior. I had no idea if they were ever going to be imported to the United States. I used to visit Foreign Motors in Boston to see some of the sports cars that were on sale there, including a tiny Fiat Abarth 750 Zagato owned by the sales manager.

One day, they had on the floor an Alfa Romeo Giulietta Sprint Zagato, which I found out belonged to a local racer named George Fogg III, of Brookline, MA. George had been racing a Giulietta Sprint very successfully around New England. I never actually met him at that time, but knew of him. He kept his SZ at Foreign Motors when he wasn’t competing around the East Coast.

I was surprised to see what kind of racing car Alfa Romeo and Zagato were building, as I was only familiar with the tiny Abarth Zagatos of the fifties and early sixties that were campaigned by Team Roosevelt, Briggs Cunningham, Bob Grossman, Walt Hansgen, and others. One Abarth Zagato 750 was owned by a local who promptly put it on its roof at a Mount Gunstock hillclimb in NH.

The Alfa Romeo was much less toy-like than the Abarths. I never did see the Sprint Zagato race but I remembered it clearly, parked at Foreign Motors with its beautiful aluminum body. It was surprising to see the flimsy plastic floor mats and lightweight plastic windows, all designed to reduce weight.

I kept the car in my mind, and perhaps fifteen years later the SZ showed up for sale, in the Boston Globe classifieds. I went to see it and it was a sad sight, in a kind of metal-flake purple, sitting in a garage in Newton, MA. I didn’t purchase it, unfortunately, not realizing how valuable and desirable they would become in later years.

Then it was gone. I had no idea where it went and I never crossed paths with it again until 1998, when I discovered via an internet contact that an Alfa Romeo Giulietta Sprint Zagato was for sale in Charleston, South Carolina. I made a call and learned its history from Tom Humphrey, then the current owner. Incredibly, the car had originally belonged to George Fogg III, and was, in fact, the same car I had been lustily admiring forty years earlier!