Alfa Romeo SZ

Automotive Art   |   Photoshop Chops   |   Il Mostro

Shooting Brake Conversion

The Alfa Romeo SZ by Zagato is a testament of its time, where futuristic shapes broke the barrier of established taste – some more and some less successful. Il Mostro certainly is a polarising design and nobody can deny the aura and presence it has in spades. Beautiful however it isn’t. There are just too many things inherently wrong regarding proportions, angles and details. Huge panel gaps forgiven, this was mostly due to new materials used and likely production issues that came with it.

Most sports cars are designed to look fast even when standing still. The SZ, when viewed from the side, always looks like a car in a cartoon under frantic heavy braking to avoid falling off a cliff – quite the contrary to the above mentioned design language (see drawing at the end of this post).

I often looked at it over the last decades, thinking about how it could be improved. And while the Lancia Hyena by Zagato did just that but with immense effort and a completely different design language, the DTW article yesterday finally sparked how it could be (somewhat) solved: convert it to a shooting brake to balance the looks at least a little bit. The lower area of the bodywork has been treated to a contrasting dark colour to reduce the visual mass of the slab sided body.

Please excuse the shoddy work, this was created in a rush because we leave for the Bergrennen in Bad Mühllacken in a few minutes.

Sebastian Motsch   |   instagram @photoshopchops