Paso

Welcome Giuseppe!

Great!

We had a nice Alfisti meeting at Grobnik racetrack last weekend, here is my typical low-angle photo!

I just realised that I have never opened a thread for mine! Today we had a small tuning & styling car show in Rijeka, so I took the chance for a nice photo! I call this "Red on red"!

Good luck Miguel with finding one just for you! It's a great car!

Cute!

Welcome Raphaël!

An interesting exhibition on car design has opened in Rijeka. I was especially thrilled to find pre-production design castings in resin for our 916 among the exhibits! Of course, the GTV and Spider 916 series were designed by Enrico Fumia and won numerous awards, including "The World's Most Beautiful Automobile" in 1995.

Welcome to the forum! My friend lives in Kuwait! Good to see you here. I hope we'll be of help.

Welcome Lee! Good luck with your project!

Great photos, thanks!

What a duo! They just don't make them this way anymore.

Thanks for this info!

There is no Powerflex part for tracking arms, I bought the whole set long time ago and powerflexed all I could. There is a uniball option but no need now, I am happy with the setup.

I was tormented by Darko and Denis' comments in Autoservis Bivio that they don't like how soft the rubber is on the new Optimal track control arms (the spare part I put on because my originals were stuck and couldn't be adjusted). And then I researched the net and asked for the opinion of every mechanic I know. Everyone told me the same thing - that a certain elasticity must exist, but that it is not good when it is too soft. Equally, everyone agreed that I would find it hard to see any difference in driving on the road, that such finesse can only be felt on the track. And here I agree, but as my OCD bothered me, and the Domenigni service managed to repair my old track control arms, I decided to do it all over again, return the harder OEM and then re-fix it all. Well, now my heart is in peace! I’m joking that I go to trap optics more often than women go to the hairdresser! Fortunately, this is far cheaper! I did the replacement of softer (color red, Optimal) for harder (yellow, original OEM) track arms. The difference in the fix is obvious! Obviously replacement parts are never as good as OEM.

Hi and welcome!

I always have only warm feelings when I see some 916 parked in front of the house.

This is hard-core GTV! Fantastic!

As I promised, here are my impressions after the test drive, it was constantly raining, so I postponed the test ... The car handles nicely! My test route is a very nice piece of sea road from Mošćenička Draga to Brseč and back. There is no drastic difference compared to before the rebuild, the only thing I felt is that the "rear steering effect" that I have lost after the Powerflexing is now partialy back. Although the all Powerflex bushes have remained, the other rubber parts have been replaced, and the “track adjusters” are now new and elastic. OK, what does that mean in practice in a slow sharp bend? This means that the rear end, when on the edge of the traction will start to slide, but lightly, just enough for the driver to feel that he is on the edge. I prefer it to start sliding slightly than to hold to the very edge and then just fly away. (For those who don't follow the topic, if you wonder since when is the oversteer a problem on FWD car - I have LSD installed, so it disrupted the usual understeer of a nose heavy GTV.) On the end, everything is ok and I am very satisfied. Good job!

It was time to rebuild the rear suspension! The "general knowledge" is that on GTV the rear suspension is terribly expensive, but also ingenious, but when you have such an old car everything is a problem regardless of low mileage. Lot of things get stuck and rusted, and then the show starts as you have to work carefully and patiently. I replaced everything except Powerflex bushes which are ok and I left them as they are. I didn’t go anywhere for uniball, but that’s an open option too. I’d love to hear that from someone who’s been through it first hand and knows exactly which alternate part is used for which position. What has bothered me for a long time are the "toe-in adjusters” as they were stuck when I was adjusting the geometry last time. My mechanic managed to locate the new pair, from some warehouse in Denmark, the last two pieces and I finally installed it so that the supsension could be finally adjusted correctly. But even though everything was already ready for assembly, in the end it wasn’t trivial because when we took off the old ones it turned out that the rubber is far harder than the new ones despite being 24 years old! But the old ones are stuck and can’t be adjusted. We couldn’t move the old heads on the new rods because it couldn’t be unscrewed. And now the real question is what should they be in the original - elastic or hard? Maybe the old ones hardened with age, and in the beginning they were also elastic? Does anyone have experience with this, not necessarily on GTV? Old suspension experts at Autoservis Bivio say that they are better to be hard, and yet my experience when I replaced the soft parts of the suspension with Powerflex is not that great, but of course it depends on which position it is. As it was raining today, I couldn’t try it, but obviously it requires a driving test. The suspension settings are now in line with what Alfa Romeo states in the GTV Workshop Manual with some inevitable deviation as the car is lowered, but there is nothing terrible about anything that would specifically “eat the tires”. Anyway, the traction was always more important to me than that my tires lasted longer. What they suggest to me, if I’m not satisfied, is to try to slightly close the rear suspension, so we can see how it behaves then. I don't know if I have the nerve for these experiments, I think my favorite is the factory setup, they certainly didn't put it that way for no reason so I guess it'll be fine for normal road conditions and I'm rarely on Grobnik racetrack anyway. I'll report my impressions after a test drive on a dry road!

Welcome!

I love your level of dedication!

Hi Stefan! Your Spider is immaculate! Welcome!

Now it's a full rally car, not a gran tourer anymore!

I have zero scrubbing back (Eibach + Bilstein BE6) but I don't use any spacers. With 1 cm spacers it does scrub on bumps. On the front it scrubs just a bit when on full lock, but that's not an issue.