First Drive Review
A Ferrari engineer once told me his company obtained a C6 Corvette a few years ago to see what the fuss was about. Assuredly, the foreigners pummeled the poor thing down to a grease spot. The Vette is big, loud, and fast, the engineer concluded, but “a little bit crude, no?” He said the last part with a smirk. My Yankee spine stiffened, and I said that before I’d agree, I’d want to see what a $50,000 Ferrari drives like.
I just found out. Mamma mia and holy mother of Gorgonzola.
Kids, you’d better hide your college funds, because temptation—real, reachable, I-can-do-this-if-I-just-reorganize-a-few-priorities temptation—is about to kick down the front door in high heels and leather. If Dad can resist the thing, pass his phone number to the pope.
Alfa Romeo has broken repeated promises to return to America, and the reason is simple: Fiat has starved the brand of product, and Alfa currently sells only two vehicles, the three-door MiTo hatchback and the five-door Giulietta hatchback, the latter only with a manual transmission (an automatic comes in January). Both cars would be sales poison here.
However, in the wake of the rare-as-moon-rocks 8C Competizione coupe and spider that were sold here last decade, Alfa will re-relaunch itself with the 4C. It's a delightful espresso cup of nitro that will be built at Maserati's Modena plant and land in U.S. Maserati showrooms next spring with a base price of about $55,000, a number we hope won’t turn out to be another broken promise. Just 1200 a year will be imported, the first 400 as loaded up “Launch Editions.” To find your nearest dealer, simply follow the riot police.
It’s only once every other Halley’s Comet that an elemental sports car such as the 4C survives the gauntlet of federal regs walling off America from foreign death machines. The no-longer-imported Lotus Elise is the template; the Porsche Boxster/Cayman sits at the posh end of this narrow spectrum. Alfa’s 4C will land somewhere in between, improving on the Lotus’s few vague gestures toward occupant comfort while, compared with a highly burnished Porsche, exuding a certain improvisational kit-car feel, with its spidery headlights, some haphazardly routed cables, and a few wads of black tape.
Alfa, which started the project in 2010 but didn't approve production until after the 2011 Geneva auto show, sandwiches the world’s cheapest production carbon-fiber tub, hand-made and autoclave-baked at a supplier in central Italy, between two aluminum subframes. To the rear, a turbocharged and direct-injected 1742-cc four-cylinder with 237 badly misbehaving horses is located transversely. It sits between a pair of struts and the straw-thin tubes of the triangulated lower control arms. In front of the driver, an unassisted rack-and-pinion steering gear reaches toward knuckles supported by twin pairs of cast-aluminum A-shaped control arms.
The twin-cam engine is basically an alloy version of the base Giulietta’s cast-iron 1.7, but with improved air and fuel delivery and 21.8 psi of boost. To reduce lag, the engine uses “scavenging,” or excess valve overlap in low-rpm, open-throttle situations, keeping air flowing into the turbo. The peak torque of 258 lb-ft arrives at a diesel-like 2200 revs. Everything is overbuilt for the 4C’s 6500-rpm redline, meaning more power is likely slated for future editions.
Two snug leather buckets fill a cabin with surprisingly generous legroom, a single cup holder, and a small cell phone pocket between the seats. The trunk under the narrow engine hatch isn’t much larger, and the front end is sealed with bolts and off limits. It’s all wrapped in SMC (sheet molding compound, or fiberglass) outer panels that rise to bellybutton height and are shaped to splay, puddle, and scissor light in a way that makes enthusiast hormones rage. The 4C was designed to be stiff enough to survive a roof removal without major changes, so a convertible version is almost certainly on the way.
