If you think you are excited about this, it seems that the people of Alfa Romeo are absolutely beside themselves on seeing what they’d produced; they stood back, hugged each other and, as they unwrapped the car at Geneva, pledged to put it into production next year. Which might have been a little rash, given they haven’t yet worked out how.
But full marks to them. They think they can, and a positive attitude is worth an awful lot. Or as Henry Ford once put it: “Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.”
That’s the same Henry Ford who on a different occasion is supposed to have said: “Whenever I see an Alfa Romeo drive by, I tip my hat.”
Well, if it weren’t for the small matter of his being 64 years dead, Henry’s headgear would doubtless be going into orbit at the sight of the gorgeous Alfa 4C. As the name implies, it’s a lower-price four-cylinder successor to the 8C. Another halo car, with drop-dead looks, serious performance and an absence of pointless, distracting luxuries. The other big difference is that this time the engine’s in the middle, not the front.
Even though it’s a four—cylinder, the engine is nothing to be ashamed of. It’s Alfa’s175OTBi direct-injection turbo. For the show car, Alfa modestly says it has ‘over 200bhp’. It does that in the garden-version159. In the Giulietta Cloverleaf, it makes 235, with the charismatic Alfa noises present and correct. Thing is, the tub and skin are carbon, with an aluminum rear frame. Alfa says the whole car should weigh as little as 850kg and have 60 per cent of that weight over the driven back wheels. That means loads of traction and a very meaty power- to-weight ratio. The claimed acceleration figure is 0-100 km in less than five seconds. Those numbers alone make the proposed price tag, reasonable enough. Bear those numbers in mind while you stare at these photos, and you can expect a stampede. Marco Tencone, design chief of Alfa (as well as Maserati and Lancia) told us that just as the 8C generated excitement through big power, the 4C does the same thing through agility, thanks to its mid-engine and light weight.
The aim in styling the 4C was to evolve the recognisable characteristics of the 8C and to adapt them for the different proportions when the engine is behind the driver.
It was always a given that the 4C would have a recognisably Alfa nose and tail. Tencone says the main developments were in the side profile. “We wanted more contemporary surfacing than the BC. And we wanted it to look technical.
It’s like a cloak over the mechanical parts. This special paint is like a wetsuit or extreme-ski suit. The unpainted carbon parts – air vents and diffuser and light-surrounds — are like the frame coming through the skin.”
You can see what he means about the contemporary surfaces. The V—line that sweeps from the nose to the base of the windscreen is crisp and tailored. The side intake is bracketed by a sharp double-line flick, and there’s an N I echo of it in the inverted tick that runs out of the trailing corner of the side window. One of the most eye-magnetizing elements is the pair of deep troughs which run along each side of the car, starting at the nose and back in an arrowhead to the base of the door windows. They make it look like the cabin is tucking down into the bodywork to reduce drag. Or maybe, being Italian, the 4C is just shrugging its shoulders.
We climb, not very gracefully, inside. Tencone says his aim is to move all Alfa cabins on from the current slightly retro look. So he’s used a motorbike-like instrument pod, with speed in the circular dial, and an adjacent oblong with the supplementary info. A flying arch separates the driver from the passenger, and that also carries some dials and controls. The seats are molded into the car’s carbon structure — the steering wheel, the paddles for the twin-clutch gearbox and the pedals move to meet you. The driver’s seat and dash area is red; the passenger’s is black. You can see who matters.
When asked that how’s it going to hit the road, Sergio Cravero, Fiat Group Auto’s boss of portfolio planning. He was refreshingly candid. “We don’t know, and we won’t for a few weeks more.” He explained that the concept car had been designedjointly with Dallara. This is a good start: Dallara makes lots of winning racecars, did the engineering design of the KTM X-Bow and worked as consultants on the Alfa 8C and even the Bugatti Veyron. But the exact engineering of a production car depends on their sales prediction.
For a clue, he needed only turn around and look at the Geneva motor show crowds. The 4C was besieged. Imagine the reaction when it starts driving down the road.
