Riccardo Patrese hit the throttle on the exit of the Parabolica. Seconds later, just before jumping on the brakes for the Rettifilo chicane, he was well north of 200mph on Monza’s start-finish straight. And he was driving a car that looked for all the world like a standard four-door saloon! The sound, a new one in motor racing, as he flew down the main straight at Monza in front of packed grandstands told a different story. 

Patrese had jumped out of his V8 Judd-powered Formula 1 Williams after first qualifying on the Friday afternoon of the 1988 Italian Grand Prix and straight into a mount that wasn’t perhaps quite as different as it looked. The F1 race winner was driving the Alfa Romeo 164 Procar, a touring car of sorts, but one that beneath its lookalike bodywork was to all intents and purposes a two-seater F1 car: it was built around a V10 normally aspirated powerplant, a new configuration of race engine, but one that would become dominant at the pinnacle of the sport in the seasons to come.

Alfa’s Procar ended up as a one-off historical anomaly, but it could have heralded a new era in motor sport, at least if Bernie Ecclestone and Max Mosley had got their way. Yet by the time Patrese wowed the tifosi in Alfa Romeo’s backyard in a blur of colour – red, of course – plans for what was properly known as the FIA Production Car Championship were dead in the water.

“Ecclestone found a willing collaborator for his Procar idea, first floated in ’87, in Alfa Romeo”

The proposed series, abbreviated to Procar in a revival of the name used for the F1-supporting one-make BMW M1 series of 1979-80, was built around a new category to be known as Formula S. ‘S’ stood for silhouette: the regulations and the name of the series called for pretty much what it said on the tin. A minimum production requirement of 25,000 road cars was mandated and bodywork had to follow that of the street vehicle save for a teeny rear wing and some concessions to cooling. Yet underneath shapes familiar to the man on the street, the category demanded full-house F1 technology.

Formula S was the work of the Bernie and Max double act after a renewal of the partnership forged in the early days of the Formula One Constructors’ Association in the 1970s. Mosley had turned his back on motor racing after the end of F1’s FISA-FOCA civil war in the early 1980s to pursue, unsuccessfully, his wider political aspirations. Now, he was back on the other side of the fence at FISA, the FIA’s sporting arm, as president of its manufacturers’ commission. He’d been joined by Ecclestone in the bosom of the governing body of world motor sport: the Brabham and FOCA boss had been made FIA vice-president, promotional affairs in February 1987, giving him marketing control of key FISA series.

Ecclestone, who was already the promoter of the Formula 3000 feeder category via FOCA, quickly started working on a blueprint for a shake-up of international motor sport below grand prix racing. At its centre were the new 3.5-litre F1 engine regulations confirmed in October ’86: normally aspirated units would be mandatory from 1989 after a two-year phase-out of turbos. Procar machinery would be built around these next-generation of F1 powerplants, and so too would Group C sports cars.

Ecclestone found a willing collaborator for his Procar idea, first floated early in the summer of ’87, in Alfa Romeo. The Italian manufacturer had just wielded the axe on its F1 comeback. It didn’t make sense for a brand taken over by Fiat in November ’86 and now part of a portfolio that included Ferrari. But Fiat boss Vittorio Ghidella, an avowed motor sport fan who knew its value, was insistent the new marque under his control would continue to compete on track. “Alfa’s image is lent to racing,” he would declare. “Sportiness is the main characteristic of the marque.”

The new man he’d placed at the helm of the Alfa Corse competitions department, Cesare Fiorio, made it clear that F1 was off the table. The architect of Lancia’s World Rally Championship successes said each of the Fiat brands would have its own arena, and Alfa’s would be touring car racing. “There will be no official overlap,” he said after taking on the new role in September ’87. “Period!”

But Alfa did have a 3.5-litre V10 F1 engine on the stocks, and nowhere to race it. It had put a temporary hold on its F1 involvement when the contract with Giampaolo ‘Paoli’ Pavanello’s Euroracing organisation to run its factory team expired at the conclusion of 1985. A 1.5-litre four-cylinder turbo to replace the thirsty V8 introduced in 1983 was ready to go at a time when fuel capacity was being reduced in F1. But Alfa preferred to sit out a year while it found a suitable partner – it was going to reprise its pre-1979 F1 role as an engine supplier only.

It found that partner in Ligier, the French team signing a three-year deal to kick-off in 1987 with the 415T turbo before a switch to a new source of power after a handful of races in ’88. That engine would be the normally aspirated Tipo 1035 — the nomenclature is self-explanatory. The V10 configuration, explains Gianni Tonti, then technical director and subsequently MD of the Alfa Corse, was “smaller and lighter than a 12-cylinder – and a V8 didn’t provide the same performance”. Honda and Renault reached the same conclusion and both would have V10s on the F1 grid in ’89, though Alfa was almost certainly the pioneer.

Alfa’s V10 project, led by Giuseppe ‘Pino’ D’Agostino, had received the green light within days of the confirmation of the 3.5-litre formula. But a month later the outlook for the engine changed: Alfa Romeo, state-owned and losing money, was sold, Fiat winning a bidding war over Ford.

“From the very beginning, after the purchase of Alfa Romeo, the Fiat top brass communicated to me their desire to end the agreement with Ligier,” recalls Tonti. It found a way out before the 415T had even raced. Ligier driver René Arnoux made disparaging comments about the engine after a test at Imola just two weeks ahead of the opening F1 race of ’87 in Rio de Janeiro. His comments, aired on evening TV in Italy, were picked up by the morning’s press and swiftly followed in the afternoon by an announcement from Alfa Romeo unilaterally cancelling its agreement with the French team for breach of contract. Arnoux’s comments were “greatly amplified by the Fiat press office”, reckons Tonti. They provided what he calls “a pretext” for a decision it always wanted to make.

“Nothing bad happened, so they kept increasing the power –three hours later it was at full revs!”

Development on the turbo programme and the 72-degree V10 stopped forthwith at Alfa Romeo competition HQ, formerly known as Autodelta but now dubbed Alfa Corse in a nod to the marque’s successful grand prix campaigns of the late 1940s and early ’50s. Alfa would instead concentrate on its campaign in the new and, as it turned out, shortlived World Touring Car Championship with the 75 Turbo Group A contender. But then Ghidella came back to Tonti and told him that development of the V10 should continue: “He decided we must go ahead with it and then, he said, ‘We will see how to use it.’”

The V10 would run on the bench on July 1, 1987. Alfa Corse engineer Giuseppe Petrotta recalls concerns about the untried V10 configuration. “Some people said it wouldn’t work because of the vibration,” he explains. “When we started the engine on the dyno, the operators were very careful. Nothing bad happened, so they kept increasing the power – three hours later it was running at full revs!”

Less than three months later Alfa formally stuck up its hand in support of Formula S just before FISA laid out its plans for the new Production Car series, which was pencilled in to kick-off in 1989. Ghidella was working together with Ecclestone to drive the concept forward. That explains multiple trips by Alfa personnel, Petrotta included, to Brabham HQ to help write the nascent Formula S rulebook. It was a well-beaten path: Brabham had run Alfa engines in F1 from 1976-79.

The rules allowed little scope for changes to the silhouette. Even the minuscule rear wing wasn’t allowed to hang out beyond the rear bumper. And the dash had to remain as standard. A novel element of the regulations was a limit on the tyre width per side of the car. Twenty-four and 22in were mentioned in the press – the 164 Procar ended up with 9in fronts and 14in rears, so a cumulative 23in. Minimum weight was to be 750kg, the same as for the 3.5-litre Group C formula.

On the sporting side, there was talk of a ban on sponsorship: allowing only the name of the manufacturer to be displayed on the car was one idea floated by Mosley. The races would be one-driver sprints, with a least some taking place on the F1 undercard.

The collaboration between Alfa and Ecclestone on the 164 Procar project would become a deep one. Brabham ended up developing and building the 164 racer, and Ecclestone would even agree to sell the team to the Italian manufacturer.

Ecclestone was looking to offload the operation he’d bought ahead of the 1972 season. That much was clear in the summer of 1987. There were rumours of a buy-out by Chrysler and then an offer from Spanish construction magnate Jesus Gil, who had just become president of Atletico Madrid.

Ecclestone, with his new role within the FIA, had, according to long-time Brabham team manager Herbie Blash, “lost interest” in running an F1 team at the same time as the duplicity of his roles as poacher and now gamekeeper was being questioned by rival team owners. It didn’t help that Brabham, Blash continues, had “lost its soul” after the departure of star driver Nelson Piquet and then talisman designer Gordon Murray, who had left for Williams and McLaren respectively.

The engine supply deal with BMW had also disappeared, the German manufacturer announcing its intention to quit F1 at the end of 1987 in the middle of the previous year. Ecclestone was still talking about Brabham making the F1 grid in ’88 early that year, but for Blash its withdrawal was clear by the end of ’87. He recalls an announcement at the Adelaide F1 finale. There was no public confirmation of that decision, but press reports likening Brabham’s party after the F1 finale in Adelaide to a wake backs up Blash’s idea that Ecclestone’s intent had a least communicated to team personnel. Tonti confirms that the 164 Procar project kicked off in earnest that November.

The Procar chassis was entirely the work of Brabham: internally the 164 was known as the BT57. Ex-Lotus man John Baldwin, who had worked with Sergio Rinland on the 1987 BT56, led the design of what lay under the skin save for Alfa’s engine and the gearbox from Hewland – as well as the skin itself. A standard 164 was delivered to Chessington to facilitate the creation of the bodywork.

“I made a special swivel, so we could turn the car upside down,” recalls Brabham mechanic and fabricator Tommy Ross, who was responsible for screwing the one and only 164 Procar together (a second chassis was never built up). “That meant we could get around the whole car and lay up the moulds from there.”

The chassis derived its stiffness from a centre section from which the engine was hung off at the rear and the suspension at the front [as can be seen in the image below]. It was a genuine two-seater: there was room for a seat either side of this structural boom.

When the 164 Procar was complete in the summer of ’88, the team responsible for the car at Brabham decamped to Italy for a limited schedule of development work at Alfa’s Balocco test facility near the Alfa Corse HQ in Settimo Milanese. Two short tests were completed by all-rounder Giorgio Pianta, whose car development skills had long been exploited by Fiat, before the Monza demo.

Patrese was the obvious candidate to draw eyeballs to the Procar on its public debut. He’d had two stints at Brabham and one at Alfa Romeo in F1, and was still on its books: alongside his Williams duties he was racing the Group A car, predominantly in the Italian Superturismo series in ’88.

Patrese was given strict instructions before he climbed aboard for a run that comprised an in and an out-lap. “The recommendation was to go very slow and when I came to the main straight to use all the acceleration to show the top speed,” he recalls. “Then, it was, ‘Please slow down and come very slowly back to the pits.’” Bar the flat-out blast between pitlane and grandstands it was, he says, “just minimum speed”.

There was a reason for the message Patrese received, explains Petrotta. “The car had a small leak from the water radiator during testing at Balocco,” he says. “We told Patrese to be careful and do just two laps. It was only a demonstration and we didn’t want to have the same problem with all the public there.”

“The recommendation was to go slow and when on the main straight to show the top speed”

And that was that for the 164 Procar, though the car would subsequently go on a tour of international motorshows, Paris and Birmingham included. It had been hoped that Alfa Romeo’s show of commitment to the concept by building what was sometimes dubbed a demonstrator or a feasibility study would bring in other manufacturers for a series whose introduction had already been delayed until 1990. To no avail.

There was clear scepticism about Ecclestone’s plans for the series and Group C, as well as his motives. The cynics have always suggested he was attempting to draw the major OEMs to the top of the motor sport tree by mandating F1-compatible engines in FISA’s other major series. Gabriele Cadringher, head of FISA’s technical department at the time, doesn’t dispute that. “Bernie was always trying to bring manufacturers into F1, to draw everything around F1,” he says. The Procar concept and replacing the fuel-formula rules in Group C with 3.5-litre machinery was, he continues, “all part of the manoeuvring by Bernie and Max“ to achieve that. “It wasn’t a bad idea: you invest in an engine, you can do F1, you can do endurance, you can do touring cars – there was a logic to it.”

Not that the world’s carmakers saw it that way. Cadringher remembers the meeting of the manufacturers’ commission at which the idea for Formula S was first discussed: “The reaction of the manufacturers involved in touring car racing was, ‘We want to race what we sell.’” A silhouette formula, they thought, was stretching that idea. Two manufacturers that admitted to looking at Formula S were Mercedes and Peugeot, who ended up in Group C. The veracity of rumours that Renault and Subaru were also interested isn’t known.

Formula S and the FIA Production Car Championship appear never to have been officially cancelled. Or no one in the English-speaking press bothered to report the end of the idea. But end it did, and that explains why Alfa decided on a new way forward after the 164 Procar’s one and only run, reveals Tonti. And it involved the V10.

“To say it was a wild ride wouldn’t be right, but everything was shaking a lot above 185mph”

“Ghidella decided to build a Group C Alfa Romeo to be able to use the 10-cylinder engine,” he explains. Development of the V10 continued in the back of a Lancia LC2 Group C purchased from privateer Gianni Mussato and Petrotta set to designing a 3.5-litre machine christened the SE048SP, the SE referring to Abarth’s involvement.

Shortly afterwards, Alfa also pressed the go button on an entry into the CART IndyCar series as an engine supplier. It announced in November that it would be ready for the following May’s Indianapolis 500. The new 2.65-litre V8 missed its projected debut, but it was racing in the back of a March chassis run by Alex Morales Motorsports three weeks later in Detroit. Alfa Romeo’s engagement continued until the end of 1991, latterly with Patrick Racing and Lola. Its Group C contender would never make the grid, however.

The SE048SP was ready to run when in summer 1990, with Ghidella long gone, Fiat senior management cancelled the project. But had it made the track the distinctive shrill note of a V10 would have been absent. Politics at Fiat had decreed a switch to a version of Ferrari’s F1 V12 early in the design phase.

That means the only time the V10 was heard by anyone beyond a few Alfa and Brabham personnel was Patrese’s run in the 164 Procar at the Italian GP. To say it was a wild ride wouldn’t be quite right, but he remembers “everything shaking a lot above 300kph [185mph]”. He points to the V10 engine concept and the lack of testing as the reasons.

Even so, he flew down Monza’s start/finish straight faster than a contemporary F1 car. Different accounts of the Monza run give different top speeds, though it appears to have been somewhere around 206mph. So the Alfa easily broke the 200mph barrier, though fell a little short of its quoted top speed of 211mph.

But the 164 Procar Formula S racer was going nowhere. By Monza it was on a fast-track to its resting place in Alfa Romeo’s museum, north of Milan. A 200mph-plus dead end.

Alfa Romeo 164 Procar spec

Engine 3.5 litres, 72-degree V10, naturally aspirated
Chassis Carbon-fibre monocoque
Power 605bhp at 12,100rpm
Transmission Hewland 6-speed manual
Suspension (front & rear) Double wishbones, coil springs
Weight 750kg
Max Speed 211mph