Sweet Sixteen

Reasonable people know enough to stick with the instruction booklet of a Pocher kit. It just makes sense to pay careful attention to what the fine folk at Pocher have provided in the way of guidance. But as in all facets of life, there are among us some folk who cannot resist marching to their own drummer. The Sweet Sixteen is proof that some of us are beating a different tune.

A careful rummage though the parts bin revealed two Alfa Romeo cylinder heads, lonely and abandoned, one with a complete set of bright red spark plug wires. These sorry pieces could not help but pull on any Pocher builder’s heart strings. Sad, so sad. But what could be done? There was no engine block, no timing cover, no doodads nor whatchamacallits, just a lonely pair of cylinder heads and four cam covers. The inventory of the missing pieces was insurmountable. Think of trying to find intake manifolds, exhaust manifolds, carburetors, or even distributors. Surely these heads were doomed to molder in the parts bin until their very resin turned to dust. But there were two Mercedes distributors in an adjacent parts bin, and among the Mercedes parts were two Alfa carburetors, one missing its top. What the Alfa carburetors were doing in the Mercedes bin is beside the point, but this happy accident led to the creation of the Sweet Sixteen. It was truly an example of thinking outside the box, which In this case was a bin.

In the end, after finding an oil pan in the Bugatti bin and some doodads in with the Fiat parts, there was everything necessary to build two Alfa engines except for the engine blocks.

Alfa engine blocks were nowhere to be found. Nada. Zilch. A pity. Tragic, really. To get so close, but to be thwarted by so little.

Inspiration can strike in many strange ways, but this time it was straight forward. During a long conversation with a dear friend in Germany in which there was much whining and moaning, the idea of building a single engine became a discussion of how impossible such a project would be, and that discussion became a series of subsequent telephone conversations which managed to bamboozle our German friend into applying his wood-working talents to this extraordinary project. Voila! The Sweet Sixteen was created.

Make no mistake, this is a free-lance design, not a failed attempt at a model of the rare V-16 Alfa grand prix engine, nor any other prototype. This is a what-if model that celebrates the ingenious cylinder head design of Vittorio Jano’s legendary straight-eight engine— combined with our need for an outrageous gift to our pal Marvin to celebrate his much-anticipated re- opening of the Model Motorcars HQ.

Longwood, 2023