Drive and RestoreRed storm: the story of Alfa Romeo's DTM dominance
In 1993 an Italian saloon turned up at the German touring car championship and beat the home teams on their own ground. The Alfa Romeo 155 V6 TI won its very first race weekend and took both titles in its first season. This is how it happened.
The rules that made it possible
For 1993 the DTM switched to new “Class 1” rules. Turbochargers were banned, engines were limited to six cylinders, and the engine block had to be derived from a production road car. Almost everything else was open. Audi and BMW were not on the grid that year, leaving Mercedes-Benz, with a large fleet of 190E Evo IIs, as the established force.
Alfa Romeo saw an opening. Its racing department, Alfa Corse, built a car that had the silhouette of the front-wheel-drive 155 road car and almost nothing else in common with it.
The car
- Engine: a 2.5-litre, naturally aspirated 60° V6 based on Giuseppe Busso’s road-car V6, heavily reworked with a 93 mm bore and a short 61.3 mm stroke. In 1993 it made around 420 hp and revved to roughly 11,800–12,000 rpm, with a scream from its short exhausts that people still talk about.
- Layout: the engine sat longitudinally, unlike the transverse engine in the road car.
- Drivetrain: four-wheel drive, drawing on the Lancia Delta’s rally experience within the Fiat group.
1993: a debut nobody forgot
The season opened at Zolder in Belgium, in the wet, conditions that suited the four-wheel-drive Alfa perfectly. Nicola Larini won both races. Christian Danner, in a 155 run by the semi-works Schübel team, was second both times, and Alessandro Nannini completed an Alfa one-two-three in the second race.
It set the tone. Larini won race after race, including at the Nürburgring Nordschleife, and Alfa Romeo won more than half of the season’s twenty races. Larini took the drivers’ title and Alfa Romeo the manufacturers’ title, in its first DTM season.
1994–1996: still fast, no longer unbeatable
Mercedes answered with the new C-Class and Opel returned with the four-wheel-drive Calibra V6. In 1994 Klaus Ludwig won the title for Mercedes, but the 155 still won more races than any other car, with Larini and Nannini third and fourth in the standings.
By 1995 the rules allowed ever more sophisticated electronics. The Alfa got them too, but reliability suffered, and Bernd Schneider and Mercedes took the title. In 1996, when the championship had become the International Touring Car Championship (ITC), Alfa again won the most races, seven of them with Nannini, but Manuel Reuter took the title for Opel. By then the 155’s V6 was making close to 500 hp.
Costs had exploded, and the ITC did not continue after 1996. The DTM name only returned in 2000, under very different rules.
Why it still matters
The 155 V6 TI is the car that made Alfa Romeo a serious touring-car brand in the 1990s, and it showed what Busso’s V6 architecture could be pushed to. For owners of road-going 155s and V6 Alfas it is also the reason those cars carry a certain glamour today.
Sources
- Museo Storico Alfa Romeo: 155 DTM at Schloss Dyck
- Automoto.it: DTM, when Alfa and the 155 ruled
- Diariomotor: Nicola Larini and Alfa Romeo, 1993 DTM champions
- ClubAlfa.it: how a screaming Alfa Romeo saloon humiliated German motorsport in 1993
- Wikipedia: Alfa Romeo V6 engine