Alfa Romeo 8C
Alfa Romeo
MarqueAlfa Romeo
Production1931–1939
Engine2.3 L 2336 cc I8 / 2.6 L 2556 cc I8 / 2.9 L 2905 cc I8 / (road cars)
Alfa Romeo
The Alfa Romeo 8C is a range of Alfa Romeo road, race and sports cars of the 1930s. The 8C designates 8 cylinders, and originally a straight 8-cylinder engine. The Vittorio Jano designed 8C was Alfa Romeo's primary racing engine from its introduction in 1931 to its retirement in 1939. In addition to the two-seater sports cars it was used in the world's first genuine single-seat Grand Prix racing car, the Monoposto 'Tipo B' – P3 from 1932 onwards.
In its later development it powered such vehicles as the twin-engined 1935 6.3-litre Bimotore, the 1935 3.8-litre Monoposto 8C 35 Type C, and the Alfa Romeo 8C 2900B Mille Miglia Roadster. It also powered top-of-the-range coach-built production models, including a Touring Spider and Touring Berlinetta. In 2003 Alfa Romeo revived the 8C name for a V8-engined concept car. This eventually made it into production in 2007, as the 8C Competizione.
From the Wikipedia article Alfa Romeo 8C, CC BY-SA.
This is the catalogue record of the Alfa Romeo 8C, one of 194 models Alfa Romeo has placed in the historical record and one of more than seventeen thousand cars the MotorJury library tracks. The record places its introduction in 1931. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.
To read the Alfa Romeo 8C properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1930s were the streamline decade, when aerodynamics entered body design, independent suspension spread, and grand-prix engineering began flowing into road cars even as the Depression thinned the industry. 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 Bugatti Bugatti Type 57, the Chevrolet Chevrolet Suburban, the Hudson Motor Car Company Hudson Greater Eight — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.
On paper, the Alfa Romeo 8C reads like this: the record lists its engine as 2.3 L 2336 cc I8 / 2.6 L 2556 cc I8 / 2.9 L 2905 cc I8 / (road cars); kerb weight is recorded at related =; drive goes through wheelbase =; the layout is FR layout. 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 Alfa Romeo 8C 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. The record names the successor = as its predecessor and the class = Luxury car, Sports car, Racing car as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to Vittorio Jano. Assembly is recorded at Italy: Portello, Milan.
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.
The catalogue records what the Alfa Romeo 8C was; the ownership database records what it is like to own. MotorJury computes a verdict for every model year the United States federal record covers — complaints, recalls, real economy — refreshed nightly, with no opinions involved. If this car reached the American market, its verdicts are in there.
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.