Alfa Romeo Giulia GTAm review: it’s a thing of beauty

The Alfa Romeo Giulia GTAm — an amped-up, track-focused Quadrifoglio — is a stunning car. But is it better than the original?

Racing pedigree: the Alfa Romeo Giulia GTAm

On a Thursday morning a few weeks ago I was up early to start the harvest on my farm. But as I was getting the tractor out of the shed, a man from Alfa Romeo turned up unexpectedly with a car I’ve been looking forward to driving for months: the limited-edition Giulia GTAm.

He explained that I could only have it for 24 hours and this, frankly, put me in a quandary. I had to do the harvest; that was imperative. But I also had to drive the car. Because that was imperative as well. And then it started to rain, which meant that, realistically, I could do neither.

The problem is that the Alfa Romeo is fitted with Michelin Cup 2 tyres, which are very sticky and grippy on a hot, dry day, but when the road’s wet it’s like they’re made from a blend of washing-up liquid and mercury. I once didn’t mind a low-grip car on a low-grip road. I used to think it was fun, slithering about, but I’m 61 now and, I’ve got to be honest, it isn’t any more. It frightens me.

Of course, I could have just driven it around slowly, but that’s not really the point of this car. Named in honour of the Alfa race cars of the ’60s, there are two versions, the GTA and the GTAm. The latter has scaffolding instead of back seats, and a big rear wing.

It is a fantastic-looking thing, thanks partly to the colour – a vivid green – but mainly to the wider track. It looks now as though the bodywork has been stretched to fit over the wheels, as though there’s so much going on under the skin it’s all trying to escape. You remember Arnie carrying that tree trunk at the beginning of Commando? That.

And there’s more. The wheels have one single nut, like on a Formula One car. The brakes are carbon ceramic. Aerodynamic tweaks mean the GTAm has three times the downforce of the car it’s based on, the Quadrifoglio, and under the bonnet a bit of fiddling means there’s 30 more horses rampaging around.

What we have here then is an Alfa Quadrifoglio – already one of my favourite cars – with the sound and the brightness settings turned up a bit. And that’s what was worrying me. It looked like it was going to be a hunkered-down, lightened, track-focused monster, a car in the mould of my old Mercedes CLK Black. And that is emphatically not what you want when you’re 61 and it’s raining.

But looks can be deceptive, because the GTAm is not hard and unforgiving at all. It rides the bumps and the crests beautifully and this soon gave me the confidence to use a bit more throttle and then a bit more still. Until eventually I was relaxed enough to go the whole hog. And it still wasn’t scary because, while 397kW is a lot, it’s not stupid. The differential can be a bit lazy from time to time but mostly it’s manageable power. Fun power.

Sure, the tyres didn’t have as much grip as I’d have liked, which proved, on a couple of corners, that my sphincter muscles are still working. But for the most part it just felt like the basic Quadrifoglio. It had the same quick steering, the same V6 howl and the same sense of controllability. It didn’t even feel that much faster. Probably because, in a straight line, it isn’t. Not really.

It looks like the standard car on the inside, too. Yes, you get a choice of seatbelts – a racing harness or the standard inertia reel jobs – but not much else is new. The sat-nav is still too small and too hard to operate, and you still can’t see the buttons on the steering wheel at night. There is, however, one big change. The price. It’s not only more expensive than its only real rival – Jaguar’s nutty Project 8 – but nearly as expensive as a Porsche GT3. You can get a Quadrifoglio for less than half the price, and that’s what I’d do.

Yes, the GTAm is a wondrous car and Alfa should be applauded for making such a thing when the rest of the world is pouring all its resources into EV nonsense. But what it did mostly is remind me how good the basic car is and how I really ought to have one of those.

ALFA ROMEO GIULIA GTAm

ENGINE: 2.9-litre V6 twin-turbo petrol (397kW/600Nm). Average fuel 10.8 litres per 100km TRANSMISSION: Eight-speed automatic

PRICE: $288,000

STARS: ★★★★