The new 4C is a modern interpretation of Alfa Romeo’s beating heart — a heart that actually stopped beating some time in the early Eighties. Basically this car is a defibrillator gone a bit awry. From flat-lining to cardiac arrest with one mid-engined stroke…
Alfa Romeo is hard to understand, just like Italy can be so incomprehensible. The man at passport control wants to know what I’m doing in Milan. “Alfa Romeo” is the magic password and he needs to hear no more. My driver is doing 170kph in a minivan on the way to the hotel but has to pay a Dh35 toll for the privilege — he laughs at the price of Salik, accelerating to 190kph and blurring the ‘radar di velocitá’ sign. Turkish truckers are our only company. The hotel comes with pleasing views of a golf course on one side and a scrapyard on the other and nobody in the vicinity seems to know what’s going on. There are no Alfa 4Cs anywhere and at dinner no one from Alfa Romeo is present, and I’m beginning to doubt I’m in the right place.
Mercifully the driver is ready and waiting in the morning and we’re off to Balocco, Alfa’s iconic test facility smack in between Turin and Milan, two hotbeds of Italian industry and the homes of Fiat and Alfa Romeo respectively. The province of Lombardia is much too flat and I fear a procession rather than a proper flog of the most important car Alfa’s built in decades.
Immediately past the heavily secured Balocco gates — complete with ‘strictly no photography’ orders although nobody seems to mind my DSLR hanging off the shoulder — I realise there’s no need to worry. Alfa’s created a lush, rolling nature reserve penetrated by twists and climbs everywhere and populated by disguised Jeeps, Chryslers and Giuliettas.
And then around the bend there is a red 4C with a ‘Middle East’ sign in the windscreen and finally some actual, live Alfa employees welcoming me like a beloved long-lost cousin.
The ensuing presentation takes way too long, especially because my patience is tested since I caught a glimpse of the road map in the driver’s seat, and what stood out was a red highlighted route that was very squiggly indeed. We’re heading about 30km away towards a high ridge, which we’ll be climbing up, because it’s there. In the meantime the Giuliettas and Jeeps will have had their morning runs on the track, leaving Balocco clear for us and the 4C.
Back out through the gates and after an encouraging wave from the guards, the 4C’s steering instantly smacks you in the head like a mind-altering psychedelic — something is so weird here. I feel… everything. Darn. Just how numb have
we become?
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The Alfa 4C uses no power assistance. Yes, a completely unassisted rack, which makes parking a mission but pays off on the move. On the long straight runs towards the mountain the steering needs initiation because it’s so quick and keeps skipping in your hands, constantly playing with the road surface. It’s really alive, and in no time the 4C comes across as such a focused machine.
And you need to focus and concentrate hard while driving it, although at first I fight the steering too much before accepting to relax my grip of death on the two fat spokes and allow the front wheels to dart over the road. However, a sudden bump or even just a steeper-than-normal camber of the road will send the 4C plummeting into it, making its sharp intentions always obvious, its delicate controls demanding attention.
I love it already, and all we’ve done is straight-lined a couple of roundabouts flat out. I admit my time is short, so there’s no hanging about. Italians, including the Carabinieri in their Alfa 159s, don’t mind road rule-breaking as long as you’re in something red, loud and fast. Check, check and check.
The 4C shouts when it whispers, in true national character. Its 1,750cc engine — an important figure in Alfa’s glorious history — is the same as the Giulietta Quadrifoglio’s turbocharged four-cylinder, but made entirely of aluminium to save 22kg. There’s 240 horsepower and 350Nm of torque between 2,100rpm and 4,000rpm, the sweet spot for enthusiastic road progress. Peak power is at 6,000rpm though, so it pays to persist and let the rev-limiter signal an up-shift rather than some red blinking lights.
It’s only a bit stronger than a Golf GTI, a bit less than a hot five-door Ford Focus… But that just means you can use all of the power, all of the time. It’s not the kind of car you commute somewhere in; it’s the kind of car you drive somewhere in. Especially because it never seems to settle into a stride with just 895kg ‘weighing’ it down. It’s always dancing — even going dead straight — and it’s a master, so don’t step on its toes.
Propelling that weight isn’t hard with 240bhp, but the engine’s highlight is more its instant response — jerky almost, so caress the throttle — rather than sheer power. That’s a great distinction for a turbo four-pot, even if it’s oversquare with a wide bore and short stroke.
The transmission I’m less impressed with. Although it’s perfectly fine, it doesn’t stand out in the 4C’s long list of immersive aspects. The paddles behind the wheel, for example, are too cheap and have hardly any travel at all. Uninvolving buttons would have been just the same. Yet the twin clutch does the job and with a push of the ‘manual’ button, the experience is still vastly better than in automatic mode — there’s even launch control helping the 4C get to 100kph in 4.5 seconds, although I never tried it. The corners came much too quickly…
Alfa raised the bar with a carbon tub weighing 65kg and alloy subframes front and rear carrying the front double-wishbone suspension and the engine in the back with trick MacPherson struts. If you’re thinking why no double-wishbones, remember that Porsche’s Cayman uses MacPhersons too, for packaging reasons more than anything.
And I couldn’t help but think of the immense challenge of beating a Porsche Cayman leading up to this drive, but really the Alfa 4C is much more of an Italian Lotus Exige. It’s not a ‘full’ or complete car like a Cayman. That’s because the 4C is defined by essentiality. There is nothing in here, or out there, that’s unnecessary. Except for the achingly pretty looks... They aren’t entirely necessary, but then again it is Italian, and it is an Alfa. Even so, the composite body’s contours simply embrace the oily bits underneath. In this colour it’s almost as if a 4C running chassis is still standing displayed on a show stage, with a satin red veil draped over it.
Anyway, it’s much too small for any talk of Porsches — almost 400mm shorter than a Cayman but wider and significantly lower. Naturally inside there is very little room with that 2,380mm wheelbase (well shorter than a Yaris wheelbase for example) especially if you’re a passenger. The seat adjusts provided you carry an Allen key everywhere and have plenty of time before departure. The driver’s seat moves fore and aft but, again, needs a mechanic for height adjustment. So sort it out for once and never touch it again — this also gives you a valid reason to refuse your taller/shorter friends a go, but you’re out of excuses if they’re the same size as you. Choose your friends wisely.
The same goes for your partners and belongings. There’s no room here for anything, barring my notebook and pen. The Bic is poking out of the leather pouch slash glovebox and my camera is rattling around on the bare, carpetless floor. Obsessive weight saving carries on to the materials (cheap), padding and insulation (just about non-existent with the incessant sound of the four-cylinder ringing around the cabin) and the ugly two-spoke steering wheel, which sheds a third spoke ‘because racecar’. The standard non-leather seats are covered in recycled plastic bottles, and they tend to be pretty lightweight.
So a car that weighs about a tonne with fluids and a dieting driver, with such compact dimensions and a stiff carbon tub and 240 horsepower, has no right to disappoint with its performance. You expect absorbed, engrossed driving focus, and the Alfa 4C does all that. I swear it turns in quicker and firmer than a Cayman, and up high on that ridge with some damp hairpins it finds good camber where you thought none existed, and twists into a corner rather than turns. It’s almost like it’s an articulated vehicle. Seriously, it requires orientation.
The chassis, that 40:60 front-to-rear weight balance, such resistance to body roll and imbalance that it’s quite difficult to manipulate it and shift its weight around the axes; those are all strands of the 4C DNA. And yet the latter bit isn’t counterproductive: you soon gain so much trust in the 4C’s grip that you just go flat-out everywhere.
It’s the same story at Balocco. From the outside the car dives quite obviously under hard braking, but from behind the wheel it’s all extremely linear and predictable once you accept the 4C’s rawness; that bizarrely great steering and the front end’s hunger for apexes.
Alfa would’ve had no excuses if the 4C disappointed as a sportscar. Especially since it’s so centrally focused it’s absolutely no good at just about everything else. It’s uncomfortable, it’s loud, it’s seriously cramped (the centre console will keep dead-legging your passenger), there is no storage room, it’s not affordable, it’s not luxurious, it’s impractical... It’s brilliant.