Thursday, February 17, 2011

Alfa Romeo Zagato TZ4 coming


Alfa Romeo Zagato TZ4

The Alfa Romeo Zagato TZ4 at the front, perhaps?The Christmas card from Zagato seems to feature a new TZ – the Alfa Romeo TZ4. But beyond that, we don’t have a clue.Alfa Romeo have made some of the most beautiful cars on the planet. And none more beautiful than those designed and built in collaboration with Zagato. We wouldn’t go as far as the Top Gear boys and claim you can’t be a Petrolhead if you haven’t owned an Alfa, but we would say you can’t be a Petrolhead if you’ve never lusted after one.

So we can be pretty sure that you’ll find Zagato’s Christmas card this year (pictured above) worthy of a Christmas drool, featuring as it does a trio of Alfa Romeo Zagatos – plus one. There’s the original Alfa Romeo Giulia-based TZ from the early ’60s and its updated version, the Alfa Romeo Giulia TZ2.

There’s then a long chronological gap to the Alfa Romeo TZ3 which was built just this year to celebrate Alfa’s centenary, was based on the Alfa 8C Competizione and was a one-off creation for German collector Martin Kapp and revealed at this year’s Villa d’Este.

But there’s also a fourth ‘TZ’ at the front of the photo, all wrapped up for Christmas for some lucky recipient. And it’s a car we know nothing about. We have to assume it’s an Alfa Romeo TZ4 as it stands in front of the first three TZ cars. But we have no information beyond that.

We’re assuming the Alfa Romeo TZ4 – if that is indeed what we’re seeing – is also based on the Alfa 8C, simply because we can’t think what else it could be based on. But we’re certainly intrigued. However, we’re not Zagato’s favourite people after we had a set-to with them when we outed the Ferrari 550 GTZ last year, so there’s not a chance of Zagato giving us any information.