Alfa Romeo: here's why they make us smile

Three days masquerading as an official Alfa Romeo works driver. It was the Mille Miglia (what else?), and I was in the vastly privileged position of viewing it through the slot-like windscreen of a 6C SuperLeggera. Alfa’s relationship with that event runs deep, and watching Italy spool past that long, narrowing bonnet was enormously evocative. It helped that in the passenger seat was my actual life co-pilot, my Dad. We’ll gloss over the major argument we had on the way into Rome, and the subsequent two hours of silence, but the next day, egos parked and the map thrown out of the window, we had the drive of our lives... Alfas can do that, and I will remember that day, those roads, that car and that man for as long as I live.

This feature was originally published in Issue 284 of Top Gear magazine.

Alfa Romeo makes beautiful cars. But it also makes beautiful engines. Ergo, the company understands. One of my first Alfa memories is lifting the bonnet of a 156 V6 to be greeted by red script and polished inlet pipes – all artfully done. It’s such a small thing, really, making an engine look pretty, but it matters. It shows Alfa cares, reveals the firm’s exuberance and freedom from constraints. And the first time I drove that 156 V6 was the first time I realised that engines could sing. That 2.5-litre transverse V6 was glorious. But it also drove the front wheels, and in my head fast, pretty Alfa saloons shouldn’t be front-drive. It’s taken nearly 20 years to rectify that issue.

Northern Ireland in the early Eighties didn’t give you many reasons to smile, but it was (and is) car-mad, with a vibrant history of motorsport. My Dad loved his motors, as did many of his friends. He knew a guy called Tony who owned and worshipped his white Alfasud, and who was the first person to explain the legend and history of Alfa Romeo to me. That little Alfa’s engine made a sound like nothing else, and 34 years later I can still hear it.

What does Alfa Romeo mean to me? Not good things. It was a silly thing and not the car’s fault, but at home in Finland over the winter of 2009 I was thinking of buying a 156. So I borrowed one from a car dealer. And I put it around a tree. I was coming off a motorway and there was dry asphalt and then ice and snow at the edges and I was too much on the limit in the corner, touched the ice, whissht. I went over the edge, downhill and then I hit the tree.

Alfa. Oh Alfa. My most amusing memories are of 156 and 147 GTAs, the noise, the drama, the ability to light up an inside wheel for literally hundreds of yards upon corner exit in lieu of a decent diff. I also remember driving the Alfa Romeo Brera Concept by Giorgetto Giugiaro at Italdesign through Turin before it was launched. Never has a car had so much attention. Never. And with a glass roof, no aircon and 43-degree heat, no car has ever had so much of my sweat soaked into the brown leather seats. When I left, there was a salt ring the shape of my back. I truly am a part of Alfa’s glorious history. Disgustingly literally.

Fortune and abject blaggery combined to make me the owner of a brand new Alfa Romeo 145 Cloverleaf in 1996. I was 21 years old and it had 148bhp. God knows how I made the numbers stack up, but I don’t think life has ever felt more exciting. It was my first Alfa, my very own breadvan-shaped baby Ferrari. I loved it and cherished it from the zingy 2.0-litre Twin Spark motor to the 8.4-second 0–60mph time.

Two months into the affair, I was rattling down a road I knew well, only to discover that speed bumps had recently been added to the street furniture. The impact bashed a hole in the sump, but I didn’t realise, so drove for another mile as bits of Twin Spark started to shred themselves. The long and the short of it is that I wrecked the motor and the insurance didn’t pay. A new donkey was installed and the Alfa was sold. Sometimes I even miss it.

I remember driving an Alfa 1900 Super Sprint coupe on a sun-baked, three-day gallop through Italy’s gorgeous scenery and ancient cities. It was from 1955, a wonderful car that perfectly recalled Italy’s post-war renaissance and Alfa’s transition to what’d now be called “volume premium”. It burst the hearts of a generation of leather-skinned trilby-hatted gents outside a café in a small hillside village miles from anywhere. “Complimenti,” said one, “buonissima macchina”. Sadly, it’s only old geezers in any country that can really remember when Alfa was great. Its cars have been patchy – often pretty miserable – ever since the early Seventies. The new Alfa revival must hit the spot, or there’ll be no one left alive to whom the name means anything.