Alfa Romeo 4C 2013 Review - International

OVERVIEW

Everybody who loves of cars should want this car to succeed because a world without a strong Alfa Romeo is not as interesting as a world with a strong Alfa Romeo.

The company has built some of the world’s most beautiful cars and it has delivered innovations that resonate still – yet it has fallen into something of an abyss.

Yes, it built the MiTo and the Giulietta, but neither of them have done the business and it’s doubtful either of them are even profitable.

So this car is vital. Designed to take Alfa back to the US (a land Alfa can’t be profitable without), it’s the spiritual successor to the 33 and the literal successor to the 8C. In fact, it’s a successor to the 8C in more ways than one, because it, too, will be assembled at the Maserati plant in Modena.

Like the 8C, it is also dominated by carbon fibre. But unlike the 8C, the 4C uses its carbon fibre on the inside, where it’s bigger brother had a carbon skin on a cut-down GranTurismo chassis.

It mates this with a 1.7-litre, four-cylinder turbo engine that sits behind the driver’s head (but seems to be right on top of the driver’s ear canals) and drives the rear wheels through a six-speed dual-clutch transmission.

It’s a bare bones style of chariot, with no power assistance on the steering, very little on the brakes, a pair of floor mats for carpet and just 895kg of dry weight. In the pursuit of lightness (and, it must be said, lower costs), even the passenger seat is bolted in place and can’t be moved.

It’s a quick little unit, too. Alfa boasts 0-100km/h sprinting in 4.5 seconds and a top speed of 258km/h, but the whole car’s reason for existing is its low weight and everything pivots around that.

Think of it as Lotus Exige meets Porsche Cayman, because that’s roughly where Alfa is pitching the 4C.

A hundred of the initial batch of Launch Edition 4Cs are heading for Asia-Pacific, which includes Australia, and they’ll be sold (they mostly already are) for the equivalent of around A$85,000 in Europe. That’s going to be about A$14,000 more than the stock production 4C.

Alfa insists each of the 1000 Launch Edition models will be collectors’ items, but for those that don’t believe that, the Launch Edition delivers plus-one wheels and tyres and more carbon fibre body pieces, including around the oddball headlights.

They are available with air conditioning and a radio, though Alfa says most of the pre orders haven’t asked for them.

Your overall view of its equipment levels depends what you want out of a hard-core, carbon-fibre, lightweight sports car.

You don’t get much else, frankly. There’s a great fat steering wheel that doesn’t look as though it belongs in a sports car, but it’s not the only thing. The ventilation controls are scraping and clunking and horridly cheap and sit in a low-mounted pod that fouls the lower leg of both the driver and the passenger. The dash itself couldn’t feel or sound more brittle and hollow to the touch if they’d made it from eggshells. And if you want to check that hollowness out, you can reach beneath the dash and feel anything you like.

But most of that seems OK (the ventilation controls apart), because the 4C isn’t really about niceties. It’s about being light and fast, then delivering just enough of what buyers spending this much money expect on top of that.

What you get is a lot of carbon fibre you can see and touch, door handles that are only just enough for the job and seats that aren’t a hair heavier than they need to be. Alfa has spent money wisely on a superb digital instrument cluster.

The car also has Alfa’s DNA (Dynamic, Normal, All-Weather) switch for its driving modes, along with a new Race mode with launch control.

It’s chassis is a pure carbon-fibre tub that weighs only 65kg, but it doesn’t use highly advanced production technologies like Lamborghini or Porsche. It uses tried and tested, proven technology then has arranged to have it built in the south of Italy by a company that’s never done it before. To an outsider, it seems like an odd series of decisions to take.

Alfa has a lot of failsafes built into the system to ensure the accuracy of the chassis, though.

“The tolerance for every part of the monocoque is 0.1mm,” Alfa Romeo Development boss, Domenico Bagnosco insisted. “This was one of the key points for our autoclave machines: to guarantee the manufacturing accuracy.

“To mount the double wishbone front suspension, we have at least eight holes to guarantee the geometry. The caster angle and the kingpins all depend on this being right in manufacturing.”

The powertrain package wasn’t that hard for Alfa to figure out. The Giulietta Quadrifoglioverde (err, four-leafed clover) already has a 1.75-litre engine and a six-speed dual-clutch transmission, so Alfa effectively plucked them out, turned them around, then sat them behind the cabin.

It is, Alfa Romeo insists, more complex than that and has even given it its own (939 B1000 if you’re interested) code number. For starters, the short-stroke 1742cc four-cylinder is 22kg lighter than the Giulietta engine because of an aluminium block fitted with die-cast cylinder inserts.

It also eschews power-sapping balancing shafts and replaces them with eight crankshaft counterweights, although there are things that remain from the Giulietta’s strongest engine variant – the most obvious being the 83mm bore and the 80.5mm stroke.

The cylinder heads have also been redesigned around the intake ducts, while there are new designs for the intake and exhaust manifolds. It still uses dual continuous variable valve timing on the intake and the exhaust valves, while its direct fuel injection system is capable of multiple injections per stroke.

And as ever with Alfa, there are riddles, paradoxes and questions. Although it’s a hard-core car, Alfa hasn’t gone all the way because it keeps the engine’s wet sump. Another oddity is that Alfa turned to Bosch for the engine software even though Alfa’s parent, Fiat, also owns famed Italian electronics giant, Magneti Marelli. The Italian company got the gearbox software as a consolation.

Its turbo isn’t a twin-scroll unit, just a single variable-vane Borg Warner delivering up to 21.75 psi of boost pressure. Alfa claims to have all-but eliminated turbo lag thanks to a new scavenging control system. This uses the ECU to continuously adjust the timing and overlap of the intake and exhaust valves at low engine speeds so there is always enough air travelling across the blades of the turbocharger to keep it spinning.

It also introduces a pulse converter exhaust manifold that uses natural pressure waves to boost torque at low revs, while it also has a “control logic” wastegate adjustment system to vary the boost depending on driving demands.

It combines this with up to 200 bar of fuel-injection pressure to deliver 177kW of power at 6000rpm and 350Nm of torque from 2100 to 4000rpm.

That means the little 4C’s engine sets new standards for specific output, including delivering an astonishing figure of more than 200Nm per litre and 122kW/litre, with more than 80 percent of the engine’s torque available from 1700rpm.

For a sub-900kg car, that’s enough to deliver a fuel consumption figure of 6.8 litres/100km and 157 grams of CO2 per kilometre.

There are considered risks, too. Alfa didn’t give the 4C a mechanical limited-slip differential, putting its faith in its Q2 system instead. The Q2 hardware is an open diff, which makes the back end behave like it’s got a locking diff by making the computer brake the spinning wheel.

Those brakes don’t have too much of a struggle on their hands, though: their biggest worry is keeping hot enough. Alfa has stuck with the Italians on this front though, using 305mm x 38mm drilled and ventilated front discs with four-piston Brembo calipers, while there are 292mm x 22mm discs at the rear, though just with a single-piston caliper.

The Launch Edition 4C will use 205/40 ZR18 Pirelli P Zero tyres on the front and 235/35 ZR19s on the back, while the stock 4C will use 17-inch front wheels and 18-inch rears.

These boots mount to an unusual layout of a multi-link front suspension and a rear end with inboard MacPherson struts. Why?

“Our goal was to offer the best performance and we obtain that with weight-to-power ratio, so we tried to save weight without compromising the handling performance,” Domenico Bagnosco argued.

“We could do something more complex or conventional, but it adds weight and at the end, the goal of the suspension is only to maintain the four wheels in the correct direction.

“Remember, too, that the cost is part of the performance.”

The driver’s seat, fortunately, does move backwards and forwards. You can also move the backrest and the steering column, all of which seems a bonus when you look across at your passenger sitting a bit closer than ideal.

You don’t get much luggage space, either. The nose of the 4C doesn’t hide any useable holes of any kind and can’t even be opened. There’s a 110-litre hole behind the engine that takes a carry-on roller bag, but nothing else.

And the 4C mostly does. It’s just that it comes so close to being a magnificent comeback car that it hurts even more to be unable to confirm its dominance.

It fires up very quickly, with an engine note that’s deep and loud, but not particularly sweet. It also moves off easily, with the two-pedal setup making life easy – mostly. We say “mostly” because the brake pedal is floor hinged (and the booster is down there in the footwell) while the throttle is more conventional. Right-foot brakers will find they need an adjustment period…

It’s very well isolated from some traditional intruding factors, and intentionally not isolated from others. You hardly hear a stone hit beneath the car, even though it carries essentially no sound deadening, and wind noise is absent up to the legal limit.

It also does a terrific job of soaking up vertical hits into the suspension, so much so that you start to think carbon-fibre might be the way to go for limousines. Well, maybe not that far.

But it certainly feels stiff, giving the suspension a platform to do its thing with precision and no excuses.

And that’s where it can fall down. The 4C is all about handling yet it is so lacking in straight-line stability that you might think it was distracted by female 4Cs on heat.

It’s kind of fun at town speeds, with the nose gently following the road camber while you have plenty of time to feed corrections into the unassisted steering, but when we got it out onto country roads it became seriously busy. It doesn’t help that the car has very little caster angle and the steering is very light in its first three degrees or so off centre, because that leaves you with a vague area with little feedback.

The cure for all this is to find corners, because that’s what the 4C was born to do. Start feeding lateral load into the chassis and the nervous nose becomes a fading memory.

It becomes a jewel. From the instant you start asking the 4C to hit the corners, it becomes a cross between a mini Ferrari, an attack dog and a reliable friend doing its best to make you look good.

The steering makes sense, even if the clunky wheel design doesn’t, and it becomes more intuitive. The chassis begs you to push it deeper into its envelope and it even lets you shift its weight around mid-corner to help it yaw ever harder.

And all the while that angry-man engine is eating the road like a four-cylinder engine has no right to do. It’s fast, probably faster in the real world than the numbers show because it just has tremendous strength wherever you land the tacho needle.

It shoves hard from anything above 2000rpm (though it’s best if you spool up the turbo before you do real work) and keeps shoving. You can short shift it and it loses little. You can spin it to its limiter and it won’t complain.

What it also won’t do is sound pretty. It’s loud and angry and just gets louder and angrier with more throttle and it’s just the concentration of sound that changes with revs, not the timbre or the note. And it gets seriously loud (we hit 97DbA), largely because it carries no muffler of any kind.

It launches gently with no wheelspin, which is probably to protect the dual-dry clutches in the transmission, but it makes up for it quickly after that thanks to a first gear that doesn’t even stretch to 40km/h.

The paddle shifters move with the wheel and produce a crisp shift and a heavy crackle on upshifts, plus a big rev every time you go down.

It’s a joy, it’s a delight and then you push it just a bit harder. And then its brilliance dulls with early-onset understeer.

The narrow, smaller front tyres can’t be forced to bite any harder and you have to just sit and manage the understeer. It can be forced into oversteer quite easily, but that’s not a fast solution for a car that will see plenty of track work. And it will probably happen earlier on the smaller, regular 4C tyres.

So, in short, it’s darty. It follows the road literally at highway speeds, it moves from there to stunning brilliance when you start pushing, then it falls away just short of the high water mark every pointer suggests it really should get to.

Damn. I like it, though. Like it a lot.

But, Alfa, I was so ready to love it.

Read the latest news and reviews on your mobile, iPhone or PDA at carsales' mobile site...

Don't forget to register to comment on this article.