Alfa Romeo 33 Targa Florio history begins on the impossible mountain roads of Sicily, where the Targa Florio became racing legend.
To call it simply a race is almost unfair. For much of the twentieth century, the Targa Florio was a piece of Sicily temporarily transformed into one of the most extraordinary racing circuits in the world. There were no immaculate run-off areas, no endless grandstands separating the spectators from the machines, and certainly no sterile sense of distance between racing and everyday life. The cars passed villages, stone walls, houses, fields and mountains. They disappeared around bends where a mistake could mean much more than losing a few seconds. The people of Sicily stood almost close enough to touch them.
And among all the machines that attacked those roads, few looked more at home there than the Alfa Romeo Tipo 33.
The 33 was not created specifically for the Targa Florio, yet the Sicilian race seemed to expose everything that made the car fascinating. It was compact, sophisticated, spectacularly fast and developed by an organisation that treated motor racing almost as a form of obsession: Autodelta, Alfa Romeo’s competition department.
The Targa Florio was exactly the kind of place where engineering alone was not enough. A car needed speed, certainly, but also agility, endurance and a driver willing to trust it on roads that seemed designed to punish confidence. And the driver needed something else: memory.
Nobody understood that better than Nino Vaccarella.
Vaccarella was Sicilian. A teacher by profession, a racing driver by talent and temperament, he became known as the “Flying Headmaster”. On the Targa Florio he possessed an advantage no wind tunnel could reproduce. He knew the roads.
Not simply the famous corners. The roads.
He knew where the surface changed, where a village suddenly appeared after a fast section, where the road narrowed, where the light could deceive you, and where courage stopped being useful and became stupidity.
Put Vaccarella in an Alfa Romeo 33 on the Madonie and you had one of those combinations that seem inevitable only after history has happened.
When Sicily Was a Racing Circuit
The Targa Florio had been founded in 1906 by Vincenzo Florio, a member of one of Sicily’s most influential families. Over the decades it became one of the great tests of automobile engineering and human endurance.
Almost every important European manufacturer wanted its name associated with the Targa.
Fiat raced there. Bugatti became part of its early legend. Mercedes-Benz came to Sicily and won. Maserati fought on those roads. Ferrari made the Targa part of its sports-car mythology. Lancia would later bring its own combination of Italian engineering and competitive determination.
And then there was Porsche.
Few manufacturers understood the Targa Florio as well as Porsche. The German company developed lightweight, nimble sports prototypes ideally suited to the Sicilian roads, and the relationship between Porsche and the Targa became so important that the word “Targa” would eventually become part of the identity of one of the most famous versions of the Porsche 911.
That makes Alfa Romeo’s achievement even more significant.
Alfa was not simply competing in another race. It was entering a battlefield where Porsche had become extraordinarily difficult to defeat.
Before the great confrontation of the early 1970s, however, Alfa Romeo already had a history with the Targa Florio stretching back decades. Ugo Sivocci had given the company one of its defining victories in 1923 with the RL TF, the car carrying the green Quadrifoglio that would become one of Alfa Romeo’s most famous symbols.
Nearly half a century later, another Alfa would write a new Sicilian chapter.
Its name was 33.
Autodelta and the Birth of the Alfa Romeo Tipo 33
The story of the Alfa Romeo 33 cannot be separated from Autodelta and from engineer Carlo Chiti.
This was the era when manufacturers used endurance racing not simply for publicity, but as an engineering laboratory carried out in public and at frightening speeds. Ferrari, Porsche, Ford, Alfa Romeo and other manufacturers were engaged in a technological war in which every new season could produce radically different machines.
The Tipo 33 programme evolved quickly.
Early versions demonstrated the potential of the concept, and by the late 1960s Alfa Romeo had developed the 33 into a serious international sports-prototype contender. The beautiful 33/2 became one of the most recognisable forms of the family and achieved a class victory at the 1968 Targa Florio. The programme continued to evolve because Autodelta was never interested merely in being present.
It wanted to win.
The later 33/3, with its three-litre engine, represented another step forward. Power mattered, but on the Targa Florio power without control was largely useless. The Sicilian course constantly asked a car to accelerate, brake, change direction, absorb imperfections and survive lap after lap of punishment.
This was not Monza.
There were no kilometres of smooth asphalt allowing maximum speed to solve every problem.
The Targa rewarded balance.
And in 1971, balance was exactly what Alfa Romeo brought to Sicily.
Targa Florio 1971: Alfa Romeo 33 Against Porsche
By 1971, Porsche had won the previous five editions of the Targa Florio.
That alone explains the scale of Alfa Romeo’s challenge.
The German company arrived with the formidable Porsche 908/3, a machine practically conceived for circuits like the Targa Florio and the Nürburgring. It was compact, light and brutally effective.
Alfa Romeo answered with its 33/3 prototypes.
One car was entrusted to Nino Vaccarella and Toine Hezemans. Another important Alfa pairing brought together Andrea de Adamich and Gijs van Lennep.
The setting was the Piccolo Circuito delle Madonie, approximately 72 kilometres of Sicilian road repeated for eleven laps.
Think about that for a moment.
A modern racing driver can study a circuit with a few dozen corners. At the Targa Florio, the driver faced hundreds upon hundreds of bends during a single lap. Remembering them was an achievement. Racing through them at full commitment was something bordering on madness.
The race began as the enormous moving theatre the Sicilians knew so well. Cars roared away one after another, engines echoing through mountains and villages. Spectators waited along the course for the brief explosion of sound and colour that announced another prototype.
Porsche was fast.
Very fast.
But the Targa Florio had a habit of punishing certainty.
Mechanical problems, accidents, punctures and the sheer brutality of the road began reshaping the contest. The Porsche challenge gradually weakened, while Alfa Romeo remained in the fight.
Vaccarella did what Sicily expected of him.
He attacked.
Yet this was not the reckless attack of a driver discovering the road. Vaccarella’s great weapon was precisely the opposite. He knew where he could afford to be brave.
Hezemans had to complement that local mastery with his own speed and discipline. Together, they produced the performance Alfa Romeo needed.
When the number 5 Alfa Romeo 33/3 crossed the finish line, the result was much larger than a single victory.
Vaccarella and Hezemans had won the 1971 Targa Florio.
And immediately behind them came another Alfa Romeo 33/3, driven by de Adamich and van Lennep.
First and second.
After five consecutive Porsche victories, Alfa Romeo had broken the sequence.
For Alfa Romeo, it was one of the great demonstrations of the Tipo 33 project. For Vaccarella, it was another moment in an extraordinary personal relationship with the race. For the Sicilian spectators, it was difficult to imagine a more satisfying result: a Sicilian hero winning Sicily’s greatest race in an Alfa Romeo.
The Crowd Was Part of the Race
Modern photographs cannot entirely explain what made the Targa Florio different.
You have to imagine the sound.
Long periods of waiting followed by something approaching from far away. The note of the engine growing between stone walls, people leaning forward, children trying to see past adults, and then suddenly the car appearing.
For a few seconds it was there.
An Alfa Romeo.
A Porsche.
A Ferrari.
Perhaps a Maserati, an Abarth, a Lancia, a privateer Porsche 911 or one of the countless smaller cars that made the entry lists of the Targa Florio so wonderfully diverse.
Then it was gone.
The spectators turned their heads and listened as the sound disappeared toward the next village.
That relationship between racing cars and ordinary people is one reason the Targa Florio still feels different from almost every other major automobile race.
The track was not hidden from Sicily.
The track was Sicily.
Houses, balconies, walls, shops, mountains and ordinary roads became part of the spectacle. The same asphalt used by local residents during the rest of the year became the stage on which some of the world’s greatest drivers fought for seconds.
The Alfa Romeo 33 looked extraordinary in that environment because it represented the future of racing passing through an ancient landscape.
There is something almost surreal in the photographs: sophisticated sports prototypes, products of intense engineering development, passing stone buildings and spectators standing only metres away.
Today it seems impossible.
At the time it was the Targa Florio.
Alfa Romeo, Ferrari, Porsche and an Era of Giants
Part of the fascination of this period comes from the names involved.
The Targa Florio created a meeting point between manufacturers whose stories continue to define motoring today.
Ferrari brought the mythology of Maranello to Sicily and recorded some of its greatest sports-car successes there. Porsche became the most successful manufacturer in the history of the race and developed a relationship with the event that remains visible in the Porsche name today. Maserati had fought on the Sicilian roads in earlier decades. Mercedes-Benz had demonstrated the power of German engineering there. Lancia added its own successes to a competition history that would later become synonymous with rallying. Fiat and Abarth represented another side of Italian competition, proving that the spectacle was never reserved only for the largest prototypes.
Even Bugatti, from an earlier age, belonged to the Targa’s mythology.
This is precisely why internal links between these stories matter when telling the history of Italy’s automobile culture. None of these manufacturers existed in isolation. Their identities were shaped by rivalries.
You understand Alfa Romeo differently when you see Porsche on the other side of the road.
You understand Ferrari differently when you see Alfa Romeo trying to beat it.
You understand the rise of Abarth when you remember an age in which small Italian cars could become serious competition machines.
The history of the Targa Florio is therefore also a map of European automobile history.
The 33 Story Did Not End in 1971
The victory of 1971 was magnificent, but the Tipo 33 continued evolving.
The following year Alfa Romeo returned with the 33 TT3, and the competition remained fierce. Ferrari took the 1972 victory, while Alfa Romeo occupied the next two positions, another indication of how intense the battle between the Italian manufacturers had become.
The development of the 33 family ultimately produced one of Alfa Romeo’s most extraordinary competition cars: the 33 TT 12.
By then the concept had moved far beyond the original Tipo 33. Engineering had changed, aerodynamics had changed and the demands of international sports-car racing were relentless.
But the name survived.
And in 1975, it returned to the top in Sicily.
Arturo Merzario and Nino Vaccarella won the Targa Florio in the Alfa Romeo 33 TT 12.
Vaccarella again.
Alfa again.
Sicily again.
For Alfa Romeo, the Tipo 33 story had gone from the compact early prototypes of the 1960s to a world championship-winning twelve-cylinder machine. The 33 TT 12 would become one of the symbols of Alfa Romeo’s great 1975 season, but its Targa Florio victory carried a particular emotional weight because the event was inseparable from Alfa’s history.
More Than a Racing Car
Today the Alfa Romeo Tipo 33 occupies a special position in the history of the marque.
People understandably talk about beautiful Alfa Romeo road cars: the Giulia, the Spider, the Alfetta, the GTV, the Montreal and generations of sporting saloons and coupés.
But racing was never simply advertising attached to Alfa Romeo.
Competition helped create the brand’s personality.
The Quadrifoglio itself was born from racing. The reputation for engines, handling and emotional engineering was reinforced through competition. Drivers became heroes, engineers became legends and cars acquired identities far greater than their technical specifications.
The Tipo 33 represents that world at its most ambitious.
It was not a modified road car sent racing on Sunday.
It was created to fight Porsche, Ferrari and the strongest sports-prototype manufacturers in the world.
And nowhere was that fight more dramatic than Sicily.
The Roads Are Quiet Now
If you travel through the Madonie today, the roads tell the story differently.
There is no continuous scream of prototype engines. No Porsche 908 suddenly appears around a stone wall. No Alfa Romeo 33/3 comes charging toward a crowd of spectators. Nino Vaccarella is no longer sitting inside a racing car waiting to attack another lap.
But the geography remains.
Cerda.
Floriopoli.
The mountains.
The villages.
The bends.
For anyone who knows what happened there, the silence can be strangely powerful.
Because once you have seen the photographs and films, it becomes easy to populate those roads with ghosts.
A red Alfa approaches.
Somewhere behind it comes a Porsche.
Further back, perhaps a Ferrari.
The crowd moves closer.
The engine note becomes deafening.
And for a few seconds Sicily is again the centre of the racing world.
That is the real legacy of the Alfa Romeo 33 at the Targa Florio.
It was a brilliant racing car, certainly. It represented sophisticated Italian engineering, Autodelta’s determination and Alfa Romeo’s extraordinary motorsport tradition.
But the statistics only explain part of the story.
The rest belongs to the people standing beside the road.
To Carlo Chiti and the engineers.
To Toine Hezemans.
To Andrea de Adamich.
To Gijs van Lennep.
To Arturo Merzario.
Above all, to Nino Vaccarella, the Sicilian professor who understood those impossible roads as though they were lines written in a book he had spent his whole life reading.
And perhaps that is why the image of an Alfa Romeo 33 attacking the Targa Florio remains so powerful.
The car and the landscape seem to belong together.
A machine built for speed.
A race built from mountains.
A manufacturer with racing in its blood.
And an island that, for one extraordinary era, allowed the world’s fastest cars to race through its front door.