Alfa Romeo P1
Alfa Romeo
MarqueAlfa Romeo
Production1923–1924
Engine1990 cc I6 DOHC / 95 bhp @ 5000 rpm (1923) / 115 bhp @ 5000 rpm (1924)
Alfa Romeo
Alfa Romeo P1 or Alfa Romeo Tipo P1 was the first Grand Prix car made by Alfa Romeo. Produced in 1923, the car had a 2.0 L straight-6 engine and it produced 95 bhp (71 kW) at 5000 rpms. The bore and stroke were 65mm and 100mm, respectively. Three cars were entered in the Italian GP at Monza in 1923, for Antonio Ascari, Giuseppe Campari and Ugo Sivocci.
When Sivocci was practicing for the GP in September 1923 he crashed and was killed. Alfa Romeo withdrew from the competition and development of the car was stopped. In 1924 a new version with Roots-compressor was made and became the P1 Compressore 1924. In 1923 Vittorio Jano was hired to Alfa Romeo to design new car and P2 was born.
From the Wikipedia article Alfa Romeo P1, CC BY-SA.
This is the catalogue record of the Alfa Romeo P1, 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 1923. 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 P1 properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1920s were the vintage era, when coachbuilt bodies, six- and eight-cylinder engines and the first true luxury marques defined a golden age of craftsmanship. 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 Renault Renault KJ, the Renault Renault KZ, the Alvis Car and Engineering Company Ltd Alvis 12/50 — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.
On paper, the Alfa Romeo P1 reads like this: the record lists its engine as 1990 cc I6 DOHC / 95 bhp @ 5000 rpm (1923) / 115 bhp @ 5000 rpm (1924); kerb weight is recorded at 850 kg; 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 P1 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 = Alfa Romeo P2 as its predecessor and the Alfa Romeo P2 as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to Giuseppe Merosi. Assembly is recorded at predecessor =.
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 P1 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.
Tap a star. Ratings are kept on your device and feed the most-loved list.
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.