Why Alfa Romeo matters to Top Gear

Connectivity. It’s a very 2016 word. But slide behind the wheel of a 1928 Alfa Romeo 6C 1500 SS, and the tyrannous 4G wifi matrix that enslaves the entire planet these days instantly dissipates in a cloud of meaningless ones and zeros.

Rather than marshalling a set of software signals and algorithms, which is what driving a modern car is increasingly about, the 6C demands not just wrists, forearms or even shoulders’ worth of physical input, it wants your whole body to be involved. The huge, four-spoke steering wheel makes your hands tingle and smell of metal. There’s no synchromesh in the gearbox, so guiding the spindly lever across the open gate is a process that requires maximum mental and physical dexterity. You can’t help but picture those spinning cogs and serrated teeth every time you press the clutch. Great when you get it right, like shaking hands with a vaudevillian comic with one of those palm buzzers when you get it wrong. You’re the clown, though.

Photography: Alex Tapley

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

And although 76bhp doesn’t sound like much, it’s enough to send 845kg of 88-year-old, 1.5-litre supercharged and ladder-framed Alfa sideways, plunging your mind through a Doctor Who-style time vortex to the year Giuseppe Campari won the Mille Miglia in a car identical to this, averaging 52mph across the unpredictable interwar Italian topography. How the hell did he do it?

Enzo Ferrari raced one, too. It was around 1928 that he abandoned his racing driver ambitions in favour of running Alfa Romeo’s Grand Prix team. The famous Scuderia Ferrari shield appeared on Alfa Romeos long before it graced his own marque. Alfa’s engineering genius at the time was Vittorio Jano; poached from Fiat in 1923, he masterminded the Alfa P2 that won the first ever Grand Prix world championship in 1925, and he effectively invented the GT when he reimagined the racing car as the first road-going 6C in the late Twenties. Jano would progress through Lancia before ending up alongside Enzo again in Maranello, prior to his death in 1965.

Connectivity: the tendrils of the Alfa Romeo timeline travel far and wide.

You could also argue that, long before BMW coined the term, Alfa Romeo produced the ultimate driving machine – lots of them, in fact. We did argue, wondering as we always do when a new Alfa Romeo arrives whether – why – anyone under the age of 40 should care. The less sentimental members of the TG brains trust believe that the vat of goodwill Alfa has been paddling in for most of this century is now a muddy puddle. Fortunately, the new Giulia is a car that stands on its own merits, but even so, a trip to the company’s magnificent museum – which Alfa calls la macchina del tempo or time machine – to reassert the bloodline seems like a good idea.

Not least because this is a museum with a test track sandwiched between it and the E62 autostrada near Arese. How thoughtful.

Based at the company’s historic HQ, the museo reopened last summer following a four-year renovation by Italian architect Benedetto Camerana (a member of the extended Agnelli clan, which controls FCA), and showcases 69 models grouped into four themes across six floors. It’s a spectacular set-up, and cars like the 1935 dual-engined Bimotore, 1952’s Disco Volante (Jaguar may have been making notes), and Bertone’s 1968 Carabo concept cut a spectacular swathe through the idea of simple sentiment. These three are integral to the automotive narrative that’s brought us to this moment in space and time, whether you’ve heard of them or not.

As are the five cars we manage to assemble on the track outside. To be honest, we submitted a wish list and hoped for the best. Not everything in the wider museum collection is a runner, you see, but along with the 6C 1500 SS, the Giulia TI Super, Tipo 33 Daytona, 75 Turbo Evoluzione and 8C Competizione do a good job of telling the Alfa story.

The new Giulia’s key predecessor is the Sixties saloon. How and where you arrive at this vehicle depends on the context in which you first saw one. For me, it’s a car that looks wrong without Polizia decals, a wailing siren, and a Quincy Jones soundtrack. Michael Caine and co may have rendered pursuing Giulias useless in The Italian Job, but this little saloon – somehow curvy and boxy at the same time, with a sweet little reverse cut in the rear glass, and some sublime styling licks – rivals BMW’s neue klasse as the car that established the affordable sports saloon template. Both landed in 1962; Alfa Romeo managed to keep the Giulia in production for a whopping 16 years.

The white car you see here is the ultra-rare TI Super, one of only 501 homologated for road use,its 1.6-litre twin-cam sporting two Weber carbs and a higher compression to push power output to 110bhp. As well as the quadrifoglio verde on the front wing and the mesh inset on the grille, the Super got three cowled instruments inside, and funky seats with a slice taken out of the lumbar area (where a cop or bodyguard would wear a Beretta handgun, we’re surmising). It’s lovely to drive, handling and stopping in a way that defies its years, though not accelerating – it’s slow.

This is not the word that springs to mind when confronted with the Tipo (T) 33/2 ‘Daytona’. Loud. Cramped. Scared. They’re all in the queue ahead of slow, along with 100,000 other adjectives. The 33 racing Tipo represents a noble bloodline within the Alfa pedigree, and this is a 1968 car, whose body was reworked for greater aerodynamic effect. Enlarged side intakes fed cooling air to the brakes and engine; that was a 2.0-litre V8, which produced 270bhp and revved to an ear-splitting 9,600rpm. Alfa’s competition wing Autodelta ran five T33/2s at the Daytona 24 hour race in January 1968, and they managed fifth, sixth and seventh behind Porsche’s winning 907s. The little Alfa also raced that year at the BOAC 500 at Brands Hatch, at Monza, in the Targa Florio, and at the Nürburgring. Sporting new long-tail bodywork, factory T33/2s finished fourth, fifth and sixth at the ’68 Le Mans 24 hours, behind the Ford GT40 and the Porsche 907, but taking a deserved 2.0-litre class win.

Italian endurance cars were built for pocket-sized drivers like Nino Vaccarella and Arturio Merzario; being closer in size to the comedically uncompact Carry On lummox Bernard Bresslaw, driving the T33/2 is a different sort of personal endurance feat. The roof panel has to come out, for a start. The museum test track isn’t really the place for it, either, like asking a cheetah to run round your front room, and the whole thing has the potential for expensive embarrassment. The mechanics wave their arms in the time-honoured tradition, beckoning me to increase the revs, and I set off, thankfully without stalling. It is, in every possible way, sensational – noisy, fast, odorous, brutal but oddly delicate, like piloting a beautiful cola can, with roughly the same level of protection. Racing one of these at Le Mans would certainly have focused the mind (mainly on what would happen to your ankles if you went into the Armco head-on).

Alfa also raced the 75 Turbo Evoluzione, a car whose boxy bits have extra boxes grafted on. Like its Giulia Super brother, homologation rules (for Group A) meant only 500 were made, and the 75’s 1.8-litre engine musters a mere 155bhp. Think of it is an improbably rare equivalent to BMW’s E30 M3, a titan of the late-Eighties European touring car circus, and you’d be close, and this one carries the fingerprints of the likes of Nicola Larini, Gabriele Tarquini, and ex-Lancia rally god Sandro Munari. That’ll do.

The naysayers reckon the 75 marks the point at which Alfa began to lose the plot, and its rear transaxle ’box and general build quality weren’t without their foibles. But any 75 is a rare sight these days, and the Turbo Evoluzione turns out to be a surprisingly adroit thing to drive. It turns in beautifully, and the steering and gearchange are unexpectedly connected. Great seats, too, and the interior couldn’t be more Eighties if it had an inbuilt Filofax and a copy of Duran Duran’s Decade on perma-rotate. On cassette. In short, I love it.

The 8C Competizione is here simply because we wanted something unutterably beautiful to look at, and because I’ve never driven one before. I’m selfless that way. Also, it’s a spectacular riposte to the idea that modern Alfa appreciation is strictly for sentimentalists. OK, so it was a 500-only limited run supercar that filched Maserati’s platform and powertrain, and despite being not yet a decade old, its semi-auto gearbox already feels old-hat. It was a bit of a chancer. But even on this modest test track, the 8C bursts with the sort of sky-scraping character that all great Alfa Romeos have, and sounds more awesome still, possibly one of the greatest sounding cars ever made. 

It also seemed, for a time, worryingly like a full stop on one of the most compelling automotive stories of them all. Nothing lasts forever, after all. But if the new Giulia is anything to go by, Alfa Romeo has cherry-picked the best elements of its past and reconnected with them in some considerable style. The story continues.

Chris Harris Drives: the Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio