By Charles Bradley – January 31, 2025
New Film Friday On Petrolicious: Chasing The Alpine Dream
Petrolicious, the creator of quality, original films and articles for classic car enthusiasts, has released its latest video, featuring automotive devotee Jürgen Claus who tracked down the car of his dreams, an original Alpine A110 rally car. After a couple of years away, the Petrolicious website and YouTube Channel has been recently rebooted by duPont REGISTRY Group, and new films are now dropping every Friday. Petrolicious celebrates the inventions, the personalities, and the aesthetics that ignite a collective lust for great automotive machines, and it seeks to inform, entertain, and inspire its community of aficionados and pique the interest of those who have been missing out. Today, Petrolicious takes up Claus’s story... In Stuttgart, two brands are king: Porsche and Mercedes. Their presence is ubiquitous, paved into the roads, the culture, and the very identity of the region. If you grew up there, you were supposed to pick a side and pledge allegiance to one of the two. Jürgen Claus grew up in Stuttgart but didn’t adhere to that conventional German wisdom. Something else had earned his attention. In flashes, glimpses, and a few stolen frames of life during rides on his bike, he would spot a car. It would streak past, barely there, and then gone, but each time, it gave Jürgen something to dream about. Before it was a legend, before it was the car that toppled giants, the A110 was a newly fleshed curiosity. The Alpine was born in Dieppe, France, in the early 1960s as Jean Rédélé’s vision of a “weight is king” sports car built for agility over brute force. He saw weight as the real enemy, believing that the right balance of power, size, handling, and simplicity would create something truly special. What the world ended up with was a fiberglass-bodied, rear-engined scalpel of a car, built on Renault underpinnings. It was compact, delicate looking, and deceptively quick. The A110 would eventually thrive where muscle cars faltered, becoming a Rally tool that affixed its name onto motorsport history. It won everywhere, on the Monte Carlo stages, in the Alps, on gravel, on tarmac. It was light, agile, and utterly unforgiving. In 1973, when the World Rally Championship was officially founded, it was the Alpine A110 that took the very first title, proving that more horsepower wasn’t always better. Other lightweight pioneers like the Lancia Stratos may never have been penned if it wasn’t for the A110. Jürgen’s search for his A110 took him deep into the unknown, pulling threads on rumors and whispers. Finding a regular Alpine in decent condition isn’t easy. Finding a works race car? Almost impossible. The world is full of lookalikes, tributes, and fiberglass imposters. True competition built A110s are ghosts. He eventually caught wind of a car that had supposedly been sold in Hungary, a real Alpine with real pedigree. There were no documents, no clear paper trail, just a lead. He did what anyone with an obsession this deep would do. He packed a backpack full of cash and hit the road. No guarantees, no promises. Beneath layers of questionable modifications, spoilers, turbochargers, intercoolers, there was something unmistakable. The plaques in the front trunk were still original. On them, the chassis number revealed the truth. The car was real. It didn’t matter that it looked nothing like it should. It didn’t matter that it would take years of work to bring it back. He wasn’t leaving without it. Jürgen spent years undoing the damage. Hours turned into weeks and weeks turned into months. Sanding, welding, reshaping… dreaming. Obsessing. There were no blueprints, no factory records with detailed specs. The A110 wasn’t built with the obsessive precision of a Stuttgart engineer. It was built by French hands, refined through trial and error. Every reinforcement, every brace, every tweak was added as needed. Problems were solved on the spot, one by one with little documentation to follow. There were only 17 genuine versions of this car ever built, and that is in 1973. How many still existed? Just a handful of originals bobbing in a sea of replicas. Waiting to be discovered, and restored. “My name is Jürgen Claus,” he says, “and I fell in love with a queen. The queen of rallies.”
