Why are there so many registers? I have asked myself that very question, and I am calling “kettle black” as I have 4 of them. There was a time when I started another one (164Q), so I was managing 5 registers. Think of it as a quest to find the “Holy Grail” of knowing all of the cars that exist/existed. The only place that you could consider as a Mecca for the Alfa Romeo owner is the Archives at Alfa Romeo run by Marco Fazio. If you provide your cars information, he can tap into the data base to retrieve the information on your car.
Some registers have cars on them that have an in-depth racing history that could fill pages of a book, some are unique, limited production, or as a way to share information for parts/repairs/sales.
The first questions you ask yourself will be…what format am I going to use and what am I going to track in the register?” There are a plethora of them out there anyone can use to start up a register from MS Excel spreadsheet to just about any format you can write up in HTML etc. This is probably going to be the hardest questions you will ask yourself as the the two questions are inexplicably intertwined. Once you get those questions answered then you will know the format.
You have to do your research before you even put a “pen to the page”. In the case of the Veloce Registers I started with Cav. Sr. Luigi Fusi as my source as he wrote the bible of Alfa Romeo production from the inception of the company. These so called bibles of production numbers fetch several hundreds of dollars when they come on the market as they are out of print and are esteemed by the Alfa community as a book to have on the shelf.
The 164Q Register was taken over from another person who wasn’t doing much with it, so I asked several times if I could do the honor of being the webmaster for the 164Q’s. The case of starting a 164Q (Quadrifoglio) Register had to do with a misnomer of how many cars were actually imported to the USA. It was said that there were no more than 35 cars imported. Well…as we found out there were only 35 cars imported, for 1994. Then there were another 95 cars imported for 1995. The research showed that the cars came in only 3 colors; red, black and white. There is a difference in the two years as to what came on each car. There is also a International 164Q register in England. We both back linked to each other so we could keep tabs on just how many were registered. Using an algorithm, we managed to ferret out all of the cars in a daily web search that someone wrote for us.
So thus began a new register, tracking they year, chassis number, color of the car, color of the interior, last registered, and current/past owners. Photographs were requested. A site submission page was written and the word was passed around in the Alfa circles. I have since relinquished control of the 164Q/Q4 Register when a private inquiry came to me. It was becoming very hard to do 5 registers.
As to the Veloce Registers, I started back in 1970 tracking the 1600 Giulia Spider Veloce’s as I heard they were rare. To be exact there are only 1091 cars made of this model. The Giulia Veloce Register shows there are less than 300 still in existence or did exist from owners providing information. There are more in Europe, and given time with the wide use of the Internet, it will be possible to extract a large list.
About 1998, I started the Sprint Speciale Register as it was in a defunct condition. It had been started by Leslie Hegedus in Canada, and 3 others followed. I made some serious inquiries about who was running it and my desire to take it over to bring it up to date. No one responded so I proceeded to establish a Sprint Speciale Register
I was thinking that there wasn’t a 750 Veloce Register or a Sprint Veloce Register, so I formatted a register and went in search of cars to fill in the blanks. There are now over 300 750F Spider Veloce’s accounted for. There are a lot fewer Sprint Veloce’s known to still exist.
Your probably asking yourself after you have looked at the list, is this guy insane for trying to keep up 4 registers? Yeah, I just might be, as I do put in an inordinate amount of time looking for cars, updating files, down loading photos, and making pages to the links in the register. Each one has its own format, so that can be a “itch that has to be scratched” when you are working in several of them at once. I figure when I find a new car, copy the info/photos to the hard drive, enter them into the register, make a new page for each car, and transfer all of that information about that particular car, it can take upwards to a half hour per entry. Example: last night and today I found 5 new cars to add to the register, a 750F spider, 2 new Sprint Veloce’s, and 2 new Sprint Speciale’s. In addition I sent out several emails to owners inquiring about providing new information to the register.
I have the cars in their respective folder on my hard drive which is backed up weekly (which has come in handy more than once!)
Am I any different than some of the other registers that exist out there? Not really, only in what I track, but we each have our own method of what we track or our spin on what we write about.
Veloce Register 