WHEN GOOD TEAMS GOT NEW RULES VERY WRONG
1934 ALFA ROMEO
A clean sweep of the three European Championship grands prix in 1932 proved that state-owned Alfa Romeo was operating at its peak. And with little else to prove as the Great Depression remained, the manufacturer retired from racing for 1933. The cutting-edge works Tipo Bs weren’t initially offered to customer team Scuderia Ferrari, but Luigi Fagioli and Louis Chiron still bagged Enzo Ferrari a brace at the tail end of the grand epreuve campaign. Tazio Nuvolari, meanwhile, was left unconvinced and switched allegiance to Maserati.
Some of the larger entries were creeping towards a tonne, leading to the 1934 introduction of the 750kg dry weight limit. The idea was to deter larger capacity engines and reduce speeds.
Bugatti was already in decline to leave a spending war between nations. But there was a lot more German reichsmark than Italian lira. Alfa, having found another 250cc from its twin-supercharged straight-eight, won in Monaco and at Montlhery, until the stretched two-year-old chassis was eventually blown away by the more potent Silver Arrows after the Mercedes W25 had navigated its early teething problems.
