The Legendary 2.3
By Simon Moore
Simon Moore doesn’t write often, but when he does it’s usually worth waiting for. After his classic work on the Alfa Romeo 2900, this huge piece of research on the 8C-2300 has been long awaited, though your mailman won’t like getting a hernia from carrying it. Moore traces the background to the appearance of the First Series cars in 1931, and then takes on the enormous task of providing history for all 195 cars – from chassis #2111001 the car in which Enzo Ferrari had his last race win and is presently in the Swiss Museum of Transport, to #2311250, raced at Bremgarten in 1935 by Rudolf Fischer but was broken up in the 1950s (today only the crankshaft survives!).
This is as true a picture, as it is possible to portray, of a line of cars as large as this one. While some readers may feel distracted by Moore’s relaxed account of how he came across each car, in my opinion this makes the book readable, as opposed to just being a reference work. And once you have paid your $400 plus, you will want to read it.
The research is painstaking, and refreshingly, there is no attempt to state absolute truth when that may be in doubt. It’s far better to know there are doubts about some cars than to contribute to a continuing false history, so there is a chapter on “remaining mysteries.” And if you like pictures, you will find this the best Alfa Romeo book of recent times.
