Your huge list of 2017's best cars driven in SA - Part 4

      

Cape Town - And here it is: the Number One car on our huge list of best vehicles driven in South Africa in 2017. Take all the Porsches out of the equation, and the Alfa Romeo Quadrifoglio is supreme, says Egmont Sippel And so Sergio Marchionne has taken Alfa Romeo to F1.

But there it is, off to the upper echelons of motor racing, this Milanese manufacturer with a logo depicting a red cross and a serpentine creature – a snake, perhaps, or a dragon – with a man in its mouth. And not because the man is being eaten alive, but because he is emerging from the creature’s mouth as reborn, renewed and purified.

Time will tell if Alfa’s F1 association with Sauber, starting in 2018, will accelerate or brake – or even break – the momentum gathered by bold action thus far from the Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) CEO, who also happens to be Ferrari’s CEO and chairman and Maserati’s chairman.

One thing is for sure: Marchionne is serious about Alfa.

He wants to do a Fiat on the brand, he wants to turn it around, he wants Alfa to be a premium player (in the USA as well), he wants to sell 400 000 Romeos per annum and he wants to shift 170 000 of them in 2018.

To this end, FCA has pledged 5 billion Euro, to start off with. Alfa engineering has been moved out of Milan, to Modena, the home of Maserati and Ferrari. Marchionne has even declared it his “moral duty” to relaunch Alfa.

From all of this, the Giulia and its SUV brethren, the Stelvio, has emerged, not only with a Ferrari derived V6 at the top of the range, but with rear wheel drive as well.

Purity and potential

Now, that’s purity for you. Even 2005’s beautiful Brera coupé was front (or all) wheel drive. For Marchionne to have thrown down the gauntlet in commissioning a new rear wheel drive platform is proof of how seriously he wants to challenge BMW and Mercedes supremacy in the segment for compact executive cars.

And for good reason. Alfa, firstly, is dear to all petrol heads. Profit margins, secondly, are close to 10% when you sell premium, versus 3.5% in the mass market where Fiat and Chrysler operate.

Marchionne wants a slice of this potential.

So, Alfisti rejoice! As the hot sedan version of the new Giulia, we get the Quadrifoglio. And what a clover leaf it is.
The engine, for starters. Team leader for the Ferrari V8 that motivates the California T, Gianluca Pivetti, was also in charge of lopping off two cylinders and shrinking the engine’s capacity from 3.9 to 2.9 litres.

Adding biturbo charging – meaning two turbos of equal size, one on each cylinder bank – and the Quadrifoglio, still with the California’s direct injection technology, is good for a sweet 375 kW and 600 Nm, which compare very nicely, thank you, to Munich, Ingolstadt and Stuttgart power; the V6 competes head-on with the M3 Competition and Affalterbach’s Mercedes-AMG C63 and C63 S.

Yet statistics – power, torque, 0-100 km/h in 3.9 seconds, 300 km/h-plus in a straight line, stuff like that – represent only one side of the coin, the Bitcoin side; it sounds great on paper and creates huge expectations.

The other side, the real world currency, is presented by feel, accessibility, responses, spread, sound, the way the engine drives and how the car delivers on the road. 

The Alfa’s V6 shines in all of this and it shines like a diamond, unless you deem the vocals to be overly subdued, a restrained snarl notwithstanding.

But that’s fine. You can always unleash real aural firepower, the equivalent of crackers at dawn, by activating Race mode.

Moods and modes

In such a mood, the Quadrifoglio feels like a sub-4.0 second car straight out of the blocks, all the way up to 307 km/h. Power is delivered linearly, relentlessly and with unmatched purity; the 2.9-litre biturbo is an extremely cultured and refined machine. 

If it’s true then, that machines are about to take over the world, you should pray that they will all be Alfa 2.9-litre biturbos; the V6 is Cuore Sportivo (meaning “sporty heart”) personified. 

Coupled to an equally brilliant ZF-supplied 8-speed auto, power is delivered in one long, never-ending continuum interspersed by the sweetest of lightning quick blips, the drivetrain programmed to deliver increased peak torque values in each successive gear, as you blitz through the box.

The effect is a continuously building surge, unstoppable in its hunger for more.

Yet, there is an even more amazing and engaging aspect to the Alfa and that’s the way it sits on the road, with all four wheels planted and in full contact, all of the time.

You can fool some of the people all the time, Abraham Lincoln once said, and all the people some of the time. But not all the people, all of the time.