THE BUILD | Episode 3: The Ultimate Alfa Romeo Engine

Added: 2026-05-13

[00:00:00]Hi there everybody. I'm Dino Cresantini from Dino Motorsports and this is Andrew Ruiz, also of Dino Motorsports. What we're going to do today is we're going to introduce our truly one-of-a-kind Alfa Romeo 155 conversion for the ' 60s to '7s Alfromeo GTVs.

[00:00:24]We're going to start out by showing you the the finished concept and then we're going to go to break down each and every aspect of what it took to bring this thing into reality because truly there's nothing like this uh we believe on planet Earth.

[00:00:37]>> Take you through some of the development process and uh show you the cool parts we have and doesn't mean we're not continuing to develop, but it took a long time to get here.

[00:00:46]>> But now these are in production. It's an Alpha Romeo 155 twin spark motor. And what we've done is we've taken what is a sidewinder frontwheel drive engine and adapted it to the mid60s to the mid70s Alfa male 105 115 series chassis. And as easy as that might sound, it's really quite significant the amount of work that we've had to do and the time it's taken to develop to make everything work in harmony to make it work in those cars. What we want to do is take you through the process of how we got there, some of the development stuff we've actually have here to show you, and drill down into each component and what makes this engine so special. At the very core of it is the is the block. So, this is the Alpha 155 block. Again, this was designed for the front-wheel drive cars. It's the latest iteration of what's called the Nord Motor. Uh, basically the last Alpha engine because after that, they went to the Fiat designs. So, what's so good about this block? The webbing all throughout the block is thicker. So, it's a much more rigid block. The lubrication system has been completely redesigned. We'll flip the engine upside down to show you. The water cooling system has been completely redesigned, so it's far more efficient.

[00:01:54]The ceiling system, in fact, let's start to flip this thing around now. Huh.

[00:01:58]Alphas are notorious for leaking, in particular in the rear main seal area.

[00:02:03]That's been completely redesigned. These things do not leak. They've gone modern with that. Far more efficient. And you can see here over here, if you want to come on in, this is the uh the oil pump drive system. So, it's far more efficient. The it doesn't rely on those snail gear gears that the original ones had. So, it distributes the oil much better than the original ones could.

[00:02:25]This is something that we do. We cross drill the block. And what we're doing is we're getting oil to feed the two and number four bearing shell. So, this works together with our special crank that we've had designed to work with this system in order to arrest the development of any further corrosion.

[00:02:44]Alphas, especially if they're not wellmaintained with the proper coolant and things like that, they can corrode and corrode rapidly and that reres all kinds of havoc on on the cars. What we do is we cerak coat everything here and cerakote is probably the most chemical resistant, heat resistant, everything resistant material on the planet. So much though. So that I mean I'm semi- joking but kind of serious that if you were to run this car for 50 years and take this off, it would look exactly like this with no corrosion. If we actually paint our headers with these and we've gotten the headers red hot and as it cools down, it looks like it was just freshly painted. We'll get into the crank case area and some of the things that we do in the crank case. Let's start with the crankshaft. Normally these engines are of a they're a 1995cc basically an 84mm bore and the 155s and some of the 164s have a 90 mm stroke as opposed to the earlier Nord motors which have an 88 1.5 mm stroke. We've developed a 94mm stroke crankshaft fully counterweighted lightened. It's about 10 lbs lighter than the stock crank. This brings the displacement to about 2100 cc's. When you do that, obviously you got to modify connecting rods. And even though we have a longer stroke, we end up with a longer connecting rod because the pistons are designed to have the connecting rod operate all the way up into the piston. And what you're achieving by doing this is you're getting the rod angle to be reduced, which aids in uh producing less friction. All of these are benefits for increased performance. We have forged rods made by Curillo. We've got uh speciallymade pistons, which have several benefits. What are some of those benefits there, Andrew?

[00:04:21]>> Uh, we got some underhead milling. We got some lateral gas ports. They're WPCT treated. Each one's weighed out. They all weigh the same. Two- ring setup. We use total seal rings. Best you can get.

[00:04:32]So, it's a very high performance. It's very reliable, very robust. What looks to be a racing engine is really a a truly a a streetable motor that you can drive every day to work or to the market or out on the racetrack on track days or even full race weekends if you would like. It's it's really really modernized to feature the best materials made in the best manner to perform in all aspects of of driving. The liners we bore and hone specially hone. In fact, when they're boarded, they're actually uh fixed in a uh torque plate, which is how you're supposed to do it with the individual liners, and then fitted to the pistons. And then the liners are blasted and then serak coated as well.

[00:05:12]These will never corrode either. We supply these engines with SAX performance clutches. These are upgraded to 30% more clamp load. We have lightened steel flywheel that we use. It only weighs about 6 1/2 kilos to deal with the extra power. some of the special components that we've made to convert the the front-wheel drive positioning to the rear wheel drive system that's obviously in the 105 115 series. So, we've got the spacer plates, the water adapter, the modified pulley, basically a stock water pump with the the modified pulley here on the water pump. We've got a speciallymade bracket for the belt tensioner. We got a bracket there to adapt the alternator. There's all kinds of different things that we had to make to uh get this thing to fit.

[00:05:56]This is something that's completely unique and as far as we know, nowhere on planet Earth do we have something like this, but we actually had this oil pan specially made to work with this motor because the engine's a bit shorter. We could actually show you. In fact, slide that whole thing over. All right, so let's take you guys through our oil pan development. Basically just bought a 155 engine and said, "Hey, we're going to make it fit in a uh a 105 chassis." I guess first things first is we had uh some flanges laser cut for us or actually these were routered out because how thick they are. And then we started fabricating a pan. So we made a little jig to get us the dimensions we needed based off of a 105 pan. This was a really nice pan but very expensive to make. This a lot of manh hours right here to include our oil baffle setup. Right. So, flap door oil baffle. It's a cool pan.

[00:06:52]Very expensive.

[00:06:54]Then we figured, well, what if we can just cut up some pans and weld some pans together? That's pretty doable. But you have casted that's to die cast. These things just don't weld nicely most of the time. So, okay, let's just do it.

[00:07:11]Let's get these pans drawn up. There's some things we want to change. We'll get them casted. So, what we have here is we added a little boss for our oil pressure in for the Mtron ECU. And then if you want to run your stock gauges and keep it looking stock, there's a oil temp sending unit port.

[00:07:34]And what we're left with is our nice casted aluminum pans with all the factory style baffling. You'd see the old ports down there. It's the lowest point of the upper pan.

[00:07:46]ready to fit a 155. This all works with your stock lower oil pan. There's areas for a dipstick. If for some reason you want to use it, you could drill this out. That's not really needed in our blocks, but for the way we do our oil dipstick setups. Pretty righteous part.

[00:08:03]And we definitely committed to these. We have a lot of these and we have enough to build lots of engines, whatever you guys want to purchase. And then to make that work with the engine, we uh modify the oil pump pickups. So this was quite significant. I think now we should see where the real power is made. This here is the 155 head, which is an evolution not only of the Nord head, but even the 164 head that that was its predecessor.

[00:08:36]So it's more efficient, it flows better, and this is what we use as a basis. We then have these ported by one of our partners to increase the the flow efficiency. And in doing so, we've also developed special valves, stainless steel valves of 7 mm stem diameter instead of the the original eight. This combination gives us a 20% better flow than you you had with the original one.

[00:08:57]Special springs, cam followers, titanium retainers, special cams which were they're also hollowed out, so they're less rotating weight. Special intake manifold ported in conjunction with the cylinder head. Then what we have is a fairly proprietary intake system using components that are readily available, but the combination of which is actually proprietary. One of our partners is Genvy. Whether you want the heritage throttle bodies or the more modern style with a external fuel rail, stick with either 45s or 48s, >> right? Depending on what we're doing, depending on what you want the engine for. What doesn't change between the cars is the whole ignition system itself. We use pencil coils. They're smart coils. We don't need coil driver.

[00:09:38]We could use the coil driver in the Shadow 8 Mron ECU. Another partner of ours. Lambda controlled. We have all the temp sensors and pressure sensors for fuel pressure, fuel temp, oil pressure, coolant temp, oil temp, barometric pressure, knock sensors, and air temp sensors. The idea is you could take the car to any elevation and do what you need. It's not overdone. We could add more sensors, but this is what makes the car run efficiently. and uh cut some cost for the end consumer rather than just taxing on more sensors. Another one of our partners is Technical Race Wire.

[00:10:15]We have the wiring harnesses made for us. Everything on the harness is booted.

[00:10:19]We want to provide a high quality wiring harness. You know, one of those things is booting everything. It's all sealed.

[00:10:26]These guys are really good. They work really closely with Mtron, help us figure this whole kit out. And then these engines are actually dynoed in-house. Calibration's done in-house.

[00:10:38]We don't send it out to someone else.

[00:10:40]Yeah, this a this is a trick kit. If we're going racing, we do external pumps, but for the street stuff, we do internal pumps. And so we modify the fuel tanks rather to accept this aeromotive intank pump. Now, these can be externally regulated or internally.

[00:10:58]We use the internal ones kind of cut down on the fuel lines that need to be ran and extra stuff in the engine bay.

[00:11:04]They're quieter. A lot of customers like the quiet stuff. We got our crank sensors, right? Our billet crank sensor brackets here. This is all a synchronized ignition system. So, we run cam sensor. We got some air motive fuel filters, right? We have a pre filter that's at the bottom of the pump here. And uh this is our after pump filter, right? We don't want to take out our injectors. Those injectors are hidden inside the GenV throttle bodies. They'd be a little tough to to service if we need to, but easily done.

[00:11:39]>> You know, we got a lot of these.

[00:11:41]>> We got a lot of these.

[00:11:43]>> So, let's go. Let me show you over here.

[00:11:45]Say we walk over here. So, these aren't one-offs. We're actually set up uh and had many of these developed. We have many cranks. We have many rods. We have many pistons. All these things are ready to go. You can see here we've got several heads that are are ready to go.

[00:11:58]The manifolds, this is only a handful of the blocks that are already prepped. All the parts get brought in, inspected, and if it's a good core that we could use, then it gets cleaned, vapor blasted, deburred, serotated. All the engines and the heads go through all those steps. We got a lot of parts.

[00:12:22]So these are are something that uh we can do in production in series production. If this is of interest uh get a hold of us here at Dino Motorsports. Love to talk more about it to anyone who's interested. It's a really nice modification. As we mentioned, it's uh you basically at race car performance for the street with the reliability of a daily driver and the ability to go from sea level to whatever 8,000 ft without the engine choking on you. It'll work at all elevations. With the stroker kit, it's got bags of torque down low. I think we've added about 20 20 lbs of torque uh from let's say 1,000 to 4,000 where you didn't have it before. So that makes a big difference in the feel of the car when you're driving it. And with everything else and it's ample power, you will you you definitely be satisfied. We actually just put these in these two cars. And this is our our latest iteration. This has the the larger uh throttle bodies, the 48 mm throttle bodies, hotter cams, higher compression. We're actually going to be hearing this for the first time really. At least I am. This car that it's in specifically, it's a 1967 GTV, the last of the uh the step noses that were brought into this country anyway because after that they went to the forehead version. Let's start this thing up. We're not going to be able to rev it up or anything like that because um it hasn't been mapped yet. We don't want to hurt anything. We'll blip it as much as we can so you guys can hear it, but it's uh you know, we're not going to do anything crazy.

[00:13:50]So, mind you, this is what it back in the day would have been a full race motor in terms of power output. And it's got really radical cams. It's got uh high compression about 11 12 to1, but it runs on pump gas, which is pretty phenomenal. So, it's going to be tuned for running on pump gas, and it should be producing at the wheels somewhere in the neighborhood of 185 horsepower. So, you can hear how this thing purs, you know, if this were a Weber carbureted car, it'd be belching and burping and farting, you know, but you don't get that with this.

[00:14:52]This is a Julia Supra. This is a 1967 Julia Super. This was actually our test bed for the conversion of a front-wheel drive engine into the rear wheel drive cars. Along the way, you know, we've learned how to upgrade the engines for more power and actually more reliability. And so, this is our latest iteration, but this is a an Alpha 164 motor, which is the kind of the predecessor to the 155 motor. This you could see here if you come a little closer how it fits here. Again, looks like it was designed for it. We're going to start this one up. Again, this one is not mapped for this particular motor, so we can't wind it out, but we're going to start it up. And this one, I have heard start before, and it pers. We built motors like this in this iteration, and they put out about 175 to the wheels.

[00:15:41]So, we expect the same from from this.

[00:15:43]Go ahead, give it a start.

[00:15:55]Nothing major, but it pers. Again, it's a pretty hot engine in terms of performance, but you can drive this to the market, drive this to work, and back. And uh it'll run all day long like this, run all day long with this at the track as well if you were a track day.

[00:16:24]You've seen the assembled engine. That was our SEMA motor that was in SEMA last November of 2025. The breakdown of everything that we do to make this thing work and how to convert it into the 105 series cars. And you've seen actually the first start. You've seen it start when I started saw it start. So, the next episode here will be to see these things on the dyno doing what it's supposed to do, running great, and putting out a lot of power. So, stay tuned for that, and we'll see you soon.