Alfa Romeo 156 V6 veloce Sportwagon LPG

This is my latest car (Feb 2007), its another blue Alfa 156 sportwagon but this time its a V6, but running on LPG.. it does nearly 250 to £20 of gas, so its well cheap to run, but you still get the V6 power. This had done 169,000 when I bought it, but the V6 engines are known for being strong and reliable. The suspension is abit sloppy as the veloce S/W don't have the sport suspension in 2000, so I am going to replace it with uprated and lowered suspension, along with all new bushes and wishbones. New rear brakes have been ordered and will be fitted soon.

Alfa Romeo 156 V6 SP3. (sold)

This is my latest car, it's a 1999 Alfa Romeo 156 2.5 V6, it is finished in Cosmos blue metallic, looks like black but in the sun it just sparkles. It was hard to find the car with the spec I wanted as there are so many options available, but in the end I found just what I was after.

This car has the Sports Pack 3 and the optional rear wing fitted. SP3 includes carbon effect console, black background installments, lowered sports supension, 16" alfa alloys and of course the lovely Black Momo leather interior.

First impressions of the car are great it pulls like a tank, and the sound of the V6 engine is just great. It simply cruises on the motorway and even in 6th gear, yes 6 gears it still accelerates quickly for that essential overtaking..

I took the Alfa over to Germany in August 2002 to watch the German round of the World Rally Championship.

Jan 2003- The Alfa has covered nearly 17,000 miles now since May 2002, in which time it has had 2 services by S& H Motors in Poole. The only problems I have had with the car are the cam belt pulley bearings started to become noisy, this was just before the 1st cam belt change was due, luckerly I noticed the noise and whipped it into S & H for them to replace the cambelt 2000 miles early. In October 2002, I noticed that the car was running slightly hot when being driven hard (fine in traffic), the temperature gauge was going up to 3/4, then one night at midnight on the way back from Southampton I looked and the gauge was on full. oops, pulled in on the A31. Had a look under the bonnet and noticed all the water had been dumped into the nearside wing under the header tank, ummm split hose I thought, oh well give the RAC a call. RAC fooking hopeless, took 20 mins to answer the phone (at midnight!!), 1hr 45 mins later they turned up, (not inpressed, will not be renewing my membership), anyway Mr Castle Recovery fills up my rad, runs car, and looks puzzelled, ummm "can't see anything wrong, best pop it into a garage tomorrow to be looked at". So off to S&H again, they replace the thermostat, no different, ahh blocked rad, new rad fitted, umm no difference, a few phone calls, no more clues, not seem this problem before, check waterpump, and low and behold it had a cracked pulley. doh. expensive bill but solved at last.

Despite this the car is still good and I love driving it......

September 2003 - Car still going well with no problems at all. Since January I have had to replace the 2 front tyres, which have lasted about a year or 25,000 miles. April was MOT time, umm I thought will it fly through. I booked it into S&H Motors one morning, walked down Tesco's for a cuppa and by the time I had got back it had passed, well it needed new wiper blades. !! I have also had a towbar fitted... and before you say anything there are no caravans involved here ! This will be used to tow my Mexico rally car, as I have a fewtrack days booked up this year.

The Alfa just tows my Mexico and trailer so easy, I even overtook Richie towing his car with a Land rover going up a hill, this thing has so much Torque. The towbar was fitted by Ferndown Trailer company which is where I also hire my trailers from. The unit is a genuine witter type and total cost was just under £200 including fitting.

I have been thinking of putting some decent tunes in the car now as I have all the kit left over from the Cossie, minus the bassbox which was too big anyway. I already have an Alpine headunit with 6 disk changer, however I want to put my Pioneer 8200 and DSP and autochanger in there instead. First though I thought I would uprate the speakers, and luck would have it I had a pair of 6 1/2 2 way MB quarts knocking araound the garage. I tried them in the rear doors but because the baskets were too big on the speakers they wouldn't fit in the std factory position.

So off with the rear door panels which is fairly easy, simply remove the plug by the door handle, here you will find 2 screws (1 is behind the ashtray). Once these have been removed you can remove the handle surround. Next in the hole where you grab to shut the door, lift up the cover at the bottom to find 2 torx bolts. Remove these and this enables you to lift away the grab handle casing and will expose 2 more nuts which basically bolt on the door card to the door. Once they have been removed you will need to remove the speaker grill and speaker, and then the 2 screws behind where the speaker was. You can now CAREFULLY remove the door card from the bottom first !

Anyway once I had done that I simply lined up where the speaker was to go and placed it on top of the original speaker pod, and just screwed in the 4 screws. It sits proud of the door card but still looks factory fit, although not a stealth look.

Next job is to buy some 6 1/2 components for the front doors and find somewhere in the boot to mount the 2 Alpine V12 amps and the small 12" sub box......