Tag: Alfa Romeo

I haven’t had a fun car in my garage for 3 months so when this Alfa Romeo Sprint popped up for sale in my area, I was interested. When the price nearly halved earlier this week, I felt it would be downright rude if I didn’t check it out.

I pick it up this afternoon 🙂

It’s a 1986 Alfa Romeo Sprint. I used to own a Sprint back in the late 1990’s. Regular visitors to this site may remember that I took care of my mate Gavin’s Sprint earlier this year and I fell in love with these little cars all over again. This one’s a later model than Gavin’s so there are a number of differences, but it’ll be just as fun to drive.

It has a twin-carb 1.5 litre boxer engine that puts out around 105hp. It’s been off the road for the last 6 years and it needs a new water pump but it started fine when I checked it out last night. It also needs a full service, of course.

Downsides: the Sprint has one rust spot about an inch-square at the base of the windscreen that should be relatively easy to touch up. There are two more very minor rust areas, too, and I’ll take a look at all of them over the holiday break. The fabric is worn on the driver’s seat and the steering wheel leather has basically disintegrated.

Upsides: everything else. The car is essentially a wonderful little runner in very tidy condition for a 30 year old Alfa and should take next-to-no-time to get back on the road. And given that it’ll cost me just 50% of the going price for a decent Sprint by the time it’s on the road, I’m a pretty happy camper 🙂

Those of you keeping score will note that right now, we have a Lancia, a Fiat and an Alfa at home. The sad part is that none of them are in correct working order, but that’ll change soon. Now I just have to work on getting a Maserati, a Ferrari and a Lamborghini and I’ll have all the main Italians covered 🙂

I’ll post some more photos after I get the car home, but here are some photos from the ad.

I remember back around 2009 or so, I wrote on Saabs United about the fact that Saab had about as many concept cars in 30 years as they had actual production models in 60+ years. We’re not quite at that stage with Alfa Romeo’s re-hashed business plans yet, but we’re not far off.

The suits at Fiat held a corporate information day yesterday, which is why your automotive news services were flooded with stories about Chrysler, Dodge, Fiat, Alfa, etc, etc.

Here’s the Alfa presentation, slightly abbreviated but with a few remarks thrown in where appropriate.

If you’re an Alfa Romeo cynic, save yourself some time and go read Sniff Petrol’s account of the new plan 🙂 .

If you’re an Alfa tragic like me, read on…..

——

The show starts with a history lesson, recalling Alfa Romeo’s racing successes over the years in some of the world’s most prestigious races. They even wheel out old Enzo for a quote about their ancient greatness.

Now, if you’re looking closely, you’ll see that the world class races that Alfa Romeo won were mostly back around 80 years ago, in the 1930’s. There was some success in the later parts of the 20th Century, but that was in your more domestic type race series. That’s not to diminish the achievement because it takes a hell of a team effort to win a race in DTM, for example, but the big-name victories mostly came in the 1930’s.

It’s fine to wheel out Enzo, but be aware that he actually took what Alfa Romeo were doing in the 1930’s and made it something meaningful for the 1950’s, 60’s and beyond. That’s the full scope of the challenge here. That’s what you’re trying to catch up to.

No-one’s denying Alfa Romeo’s sporting heart or DNA, but the claim looks a little thin on the ground when there’s barely anyone still alive that was even born when these big races were won, let alone anyone who can remember such success.

By Alfa’s own admission, the success they had on the track didn’t translate to too much success on the showroom floor:

You might want to store some of those figures away for later reference. The key figure is around 180,000 sales per year, which is the best they’ve done, achieved back in the 1980’s when the Alfetta and Alfasud were kings.

So why didn’t Alfa Romeo turn success on the track into continued growth in the sales charts?

Reliability and rust might be two valid answers, but Alfa Romeo (and Fiat themselves) put it down to Fiat’s mismanagement. Fiat took control of Alfa Romeo in 1987 but Alfa themselves started the rot a few years earlier. The slideshow offered this example as the beginning of the end of Alfa:

The Alfa Romeo Arna was Alfa’s own decision, but Fiat followed up with a dedication to front-wheel drive and compromised chassis’ that lent little credence to Alfa’s sporting pretensions.

Alfa styling was rarely in doubt, but the mechanicals could rarely cash the cheques the bodies were writing.

And so we get into recognising where things went wrong and the all-important planning for the future. What are the most important attributes of Alfa Romeo’s sporting DNA and what do they have to do to regain the reverence in which they once revelled?

Naturally, Alfa Romeo has some answers:

Personally, I’m not too sure about those. Most of them read like modern performance car attributes, but I’m not sure they’re historically accurate when it comes to Alfa Romeo. Alfas had small output engines but clever designs that were lightweight and fun to throw around. I’m not sure that power-to-weight was a priority way back when, though low weight definitely enabled good tossability.

Maybe I’m being too pedantic.

These next two slides are interesting. Alfa Romeo is deliberately benchmarking the Germans and making solid claims about their intention to make cars with minimal, if any, interference from their parent company. This is a bold claim, one that doesn’t reconcile too well with modern car company operations. That’s especially so when the car company is headed by Sergio Marchionne, a man who’s claimed in the past that there will eventually be just six car companies in the world. Small and independent isn’t his thing.

Their solution?

It’s basically down to setting up an all-new Alfa Romeo – an engineering skunkworks that can focus solely on fulfilling the mission statement above and turn those intentions into Italian made cars that fulfil a grand Alfa Romeo vision.

Now, anyone who loves Alfa Romeo should love this idea. Many have been under-satisfied by Alfa’s modern efforts, which were good front-wheel drive cars with sporty pretensions, but were NOT sports cars like Alfas of old.

The BIG question – and there isn’t a font large enough to do that justice – is whether or not Alfa Romeo can pull this off. They haven’t done it under Fiat for the last 30 years. Why should anyone believe they can do it now? Again, Sniff Petrol provides your scepticism 🙂

Well, here’s how they plan to do it.

I’m not a fan of this next slide. To claim that you’re the only maker in your intended segment that’s focused on the driver – when your intended segment includes a lot of driver-focused cars – is a slightly lame attempt at kidding yourself. It might be good for the motivation, but I don’t think it’s realistic and when you’re spending 5 billion-with-a-B Euros on R&D and production, you want to be realistic.

So here’s the intended product cadence, albeit in a chart that’s not to scale. The last column looks like an onslaught of vehicle releases all at the same time, but that last column is actually a three-year stretch.

Can anyone help me with the “UV” bit in the chart above? Urban vehicle? Utility vehicle? Underworld Vehicle? Underwater Vehicle!!??

This next slide is a little bit tantalising, showing proposed engine outputs for their petrol and diesel engines.

And here’s where things get really – really – difficult to believe. I draw your attention back to the historical sales chart earlier in the show, where Alfa had maxed out at around 180,000 cars per year on average during the 1980’s.

Let me set this out for you…..

This is a car company re-start in a very competitive category, selling high-priced cars that quite likely won’t be very practical. And it’s going to result in your company more-than-doubling your best ever sales per year??? And all this will happen before the end of a decade that we’re nearly half way through already?

Sniff Petrol.

The rest of the slides contain some fluff to get your mind off that projected sales figure…..

——

As you can see, there’s plenty to hope for if you’re an Alfa Romeo fan. A return to Alfa Romeo’s true sporting heart would be a wonderful thing. The motor vehicles they could make under the engineering part of this plan are enough to put some genuine steam in a man’s strides.

But you do have to wonder.

When the same plan includes claims of an autonomously run Alfa Romeo, when it claims sales of 400,000 vehicles a year and talks about unique powertrain solutions that can take a decade or more to develop fuelling those increased sales within the next 4 years……

This doesn’t seem like the most realistic plan.

I applaud the boldness. As a Saab fan, it reminds of Saab’s determination to re-cast itself after the GM days. Saab ran out of money and couldn’t see that plan through. Alfa are still part of the Fiat family, but will Fiat provide the resources to see this plan through?

I love Alfa Romeo. I drove a wonderful little Alfa Sprint to work this morning and it made me smile the whole time.

I’ll be cheering for them with all of my sporting heart, but I have a hard time seeing this plan turn into a reality.