Alfaholics Anonymous

It’s a dread condition, one that smites otherwise quite rational car owners with an insatiable desire to not only drive Alfa Romeos, but to own them.  The former is, at least historically speaking, perfectly understandable – Alfas of yore had the dynamics and aural stimulation to complement their appearance.  Even the rather dull drivers of the recent crop, including the now Stone Age 147, retain a (twin) spark of that.

Ah, but owning one … not always, or ever, an uneventful experience.   Yours truly looks back on his period of 156 ownership as being broadly educational, in that I got to sample a broad range of dealer courtesy cars. And ours wasn’t afflicted with Selespeed. Infuriatingly, having succumbed to Alfaholism on the basis of sampling a mate’s near identical model, his evinced not so much as a squeak in four years – nor has his subsequent 159.

I’ve driven the very first Alfa and the most recent – an automatic diesel, which still seems somehow sacrilegious in an Alfa badge – and every single slight variation since the marque had the temerity to show its pretty face again in Australia 11 years ago.  I can say that you’d have to be a Toyota devotee to be immune to at least mild Alfaholism.

That’s not to pretend that 21st century Alfas – with the exception of the 8C which we won’t see here – haven’t been living on past glories, something a subsidiary of Fiat just cannot afford to do, as Fiat’s supremo Sergio Marchionne keeps making abundantly clear.

Celebrating its 100th year, Alfa is making the usual fetish of its sporting heritage. Which is all very well, but trade on that and you’ll be judged on that. Alfa’s past is like a fat cheque its contemporary dynamics can’t cash without becoming terminally overdrawn.  And with sales being sliced in half since the millennium, Alfa is even further in the red than its trademark colour suggests.

Well I remember the smug smirk of a colleague when he learned what resided in my family’s garage. We were in Milan, the home of style, where the Carabinieri usually arrest oily gits with cheap shirts and pimpish facial hair, to say nothing of those who speak ill of what was the hometown brand.  Which brings us neatly to the Alfa Romeo Giulietta, nee: Milano.

Look at it. Read the specs. Think of the new generation DI blown engines and twin-clutch transmission (no more Selespeed. Huzzah!) Don’t you just want to believe it might approach, or get within cooee, of the second best affordable car in the world, Volkswagen’s Golf GTI Mark 5.

The best is Volkswagen’s Golf GTI Mark 6.  Our current family car is the former. For the next one, I want at least an excuse to look at something other than the latter.  Am I mad to imagine Giulietta might warrant consideration? Or is it a case of going back to Alfaholics Anonymous?