Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio: it’s beautiful on the inside, too
This Alfa Romeo is a beautiful car. I swooned at the stylish interior. And then I hit the road, and fell in love.
In my defence, a lesser man might have fallen faster and harder. Love at first sight would not be so much excusable as predictable when encountering the Alfa Romeo Giulia, but it was more the thrill of sensation that did me in.
The Alfa’s almost Ferrari-red body is muscular and yet svelte, dramatic yet subtle and as pretty as it is handsome. The prominent four-leaf clover badge that shows this is the range-topping Quadrifoglio adds even more desirability if you’re an Alfisti (yes, fans of this famously character-filled brand get their own collective noun).
But it was the tactile bits that won me over. This car’s steering wheel feels just so right and while the merging of leather and carbon fibre is lovely – and its embedded red start button supercar sexy – it’s the two Alcantara panels in the places where your hands sit that draw an involuntary “ooh” of appreciation. (The looks did get to me as well, eventually, as I found myself stealing glances at it in front of my house, and even staring at it while clucking my tongue appreciatively.) Then there’s the beautifully engraved Alfa Romeo badge in the steering boss, the Goldilocks sprinkling of red stitching and carbon trim and the slick shift paddles temptingly positioned near your fingers.
Yes, it’s fair to say I was sold on this car before I’d even driven it properly, and from that point it just kept getting better.
The sheer fizzing fun factor of this car is embedded in its DNA switch, which allows you to toggle between Dynamic, Natural and Advanced Efficiency (the latter is a performance-dulling mode that fits this car like an ice cube in a lake of lava). Many cars have this kind of personality-setting system, but usually they feel about as dramatic as switching between tap water and bottled. In the Giulia, however, the driving experience, and the accompanying noise, take big, joyful jumps as you step up.
Normal feels quite wonderful until you try Dynamic, at which point the steering noticeably muscles up, as if you think you are going to shake hands with Barack Obama but it turns out to be Mike Tyson. The way the rear-wheel-driven Giulia corners would impress even the most disinterested driver; you can place it in a bend with fingertip-fine control. It turns in so keenly, it’s as if it’s not just reacting to your inputs but pre-empting them. Genius.
In Dynamic mode, the exhaust switches from pleasant Italian mumbling to what sounds like a group of pro wrestlers blowing raspberries into trombones. The car’s acceleration also goes from effortless to elastic, as in the feeling you’d get if you were fired from a slingshot made with a bungee cord. It’s intoxicating and exciting, with a 0 to 100km/h dash of 3.9 seconds.
To hit that mark, you’d no doubt need to be in Race mode, which I somehow didn’t notice for the first few days – as unlikely as Leigh Sales not spotting a weak point in an interviewee or an All Black not spotting a weakened Wallaby to crush – perhaps because it’s hard to spell “DNA” with an R.
This riotous mode is genuinely incredible in the way that it seems to make an already raging car completely unhinged. It turns the soundtrack up not just to 11 but 21 and it becomes so over the top that people stare at you disapprovingly as you drive past – which is quite an achievement for a car that makes most people smile when it’s sitting silent and still.
Race mode gives you the full force of the Alfa’s 2.9-litre twin-turbo V6, with its 375kW of power at a glorious 6500rpm and 600Nm, and I totally believe it can reach a top speed of 307km/h.
It seems almost too obvious to compare this Alfa to a Ferrari but the Italian engineers at both companies do seem to be drinking the same adrenalin-laced coffee. And, to be honest, if Ferrari did make a V6-powered family sized sedan, it probably wouldn’t feel, or look, much different from the Quadrifoglio-badged Giulia, which is high praise indeed.
The only failings I can find are that the seat won’t go quite low enough to make me feel like a part of the car – which left me stabbing the adjustment switch uselessly, like a man in a hurry punching the lift buttons – and that the indicators don’t seem to want to self cancel.
Oh, and it does turn you into the sort of person who hates his fellow man, because all of them are driving too slowly and getting in your way.
Frankly, at $138,950 the thing I find most shocking about the Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio is that I don’t see more of them on the road, because everyone who can afford one really should go and buy one. That way I can at least enjoy looking at one more often.
Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio
ENGINE: 2.9-litre twin-turbocharged V6 (375kW/600Nm). Average fuel 8.2 litres per 100km
TRANSMISSION: 8-speed automatic, rear-wheel drive
PRICE: $138,950
STARS:★★★★
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