A.L.F.A. 40/60 GP
Alfa Romeo
MarqueAlfa Romeo
Production1914 and 1920-1921
Power88-102 hp @ 2,750-3,000 rpm / 145-163 lbft @ 1,500-2,200 rpm
Engine4490 cc straight four Twin Overhead cam
Alfa Romeo
ALFA 40/60 GP or GP (Grand Prix) was a fully working early racing car prototype made by the company now called Alfa Romeo. Only one example was built in 1914, which was later modified in 1921. This was the creation of Giuseppe Merosi and was the first Alfa Romeo DOHC engine. It had four valves per cylinder, 90 degree valve angle and twin spark ignition. Usually Alfa Romeo DOHC engines are thought to be Vittorio Jano's creations but the first one was Merosi's GP car. This kind of engine architecture was very new for the time, originating from 1912/1913 Peugeot designed by Swiss engineer Ernest Henry.
The history of this engine architecture is unclear, but other cars with dual overhead camshafts were made by Sunbeam, Delage and Humber. This 1914 GP car was intended to take part in the French Grand Prix of that year, but for reasons unknown this never happened. In 1921 Giuseppe Campari took part in the Gentlemen G.P. in Brescia with the modified GP car, but was forced to retire due to a leaking radiator. The GP engine had a displacement of 4.5 litres (4490 cc) and produced 88 bhp (66 kW) at 2950 rpm and after modifications in 1921 102 bhp (76 kW) at 3000 rpm. The top speed of this car was 88–93 mph (142–150 km/h). It was not until the 1920s when these DOHC engines came to Alfa road cars like the Alfa Romeo 6C.
From the Wikipedia article ALFA Grand Prix, CC BY-SA.
The A.L.F.A. 40/60 GP is one of 194 Alfa Romeo models in the MotorJury library, the catalogue that sets out to hold every car ever made — production, prototype and concept alike. The record places its introduction in 1914. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.
To read the A.L.F.A. 40/60 GP properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1910s were the decade the automobile became an industry — Ford's moving assembly line cut the price of motoring by an order of magnitude and forced every rival to industrialise or vanish. Any car launched into that world was shaped by it — by what materials, engineering and regulation allowed, and by what buyers of the day demanded. Its direct contemporaries in this catalogue, introduced within three years of it, include the Standard Motor Company Standard Ten, the Delahaye Delahaye type 32 coupé-chauffeur, the Dodge Dodge 30-35 — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.
On paper, the A.L.F.A. 40/60 GP reads like this: the record lists its engine as 4490 cc straight four Twin Overhead cam; quoted output is 88-102 hp @ 2,750-3,000 rpm / 145-163 lbft @ 1,500-2,200 rpm; kerb weight is recorded at 870 kg; drive goes through 4-speed Chain drive Manual; the layout is FR Layout. Worked together, those figures give roughly 101 horsepower per tonne — the single number that says more about how a car actually moves than any of its parts alone. Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear.
Within Alfa Romeo's own catalogue the A.L.F.A. 40/60 GP sits alongside the A.L.F.A 12 HP, the A.L.F.A 15 HP, the A.L.F.A 15-20 HP, the A.L.F.A 24 HP. It was succeeded by the ALFA 40/60 HP. Design is credited to Giuseppe Merosi. Assembly is recorded at Milan, Italy.
This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.
Most car databases stop at series production. This one deliberately does not, because concept cars, racing specials and cancelled prototypes are where the industry thinks out loud — the ideas tested in public years before they reach a showroom. Holding them beside the production cars they inspired makes the lineage legible: nearly every landmark road car in this library has a concept ancestor somewhere in the catalogue, and the connections run through the era links on every page.
What this page cannot yet tell you is what the A.L.F.A. 40/60 GP costs to live with — that is a different dataset. MotorJury's ownership verdicts are computed from federal complaint and recall records plus EPA economy data, published per model year as the nightly ingest reaches each car. If this model was sold in the United States, its years will surface in the ownership database; browse it live or price any car yourself with the true-cost calculator.
Specifications come from the Wikipedia infobox for this model (CC BY-SA) and the open Wikidata record, and are shown only where a source actually carries them — nothing here is estimated. Figures are manufacturer specifications, not measured results.
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Ownership verdicts are computed from NHTSA complaint and recall records plus EPA economy data, re-priced for your country. Verdicts are published per model year as the data is ingested — browse them live, or open the true-cost calculator to price any year yourself.
Contemporaries from other marques, introduced within three years of this car.