Ex-Ferrari tech chief returns from BMW

Former Ferrari chief engineer Roberto Fedeli is on his way back to Italy from BMW in Germany to become chief technical officer for Alfa Romeo and Maserati.

With sources confirming Alfa Romeo’s tech boss Philippe Krief left the company earlier this week, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles has wasted no time in reaching out to its former engineering star.

With its eight-model comeback business plan in tatters and the two confirmed models (the Giulia and an unnamed SUV) dogged by delays, Alfa Romeo desperately needed a spark, which it hopes Fedeli will provide.

He will also be responsible for Maserati, whose Levante SUV has also been dogged by development delays. Planned to be on sale midway through last year, it will now hit showrooms in the northern hemisphere summer at the earliest and should be officially unveiled at the Geneva motor show.

The two Italian premium brands are intimately connected, with the Alfa Romeo engineering skunkworks responsible for the development of the rear-drive Giulia architecture based inside Maserati’s Modena headquarters complex.

Affectionately known as The Prince during his 26-year stint at Ferrari, Fedeli’s appointment has been confirmed by FCA and the Italian will arrive in his offices in Torino and Modena as crises loom for both brands.

Fedeli was appointed Ferrari’s head of research and development in 2007 and was responsible for everything from the near-perfect 458 Speciale to the complex FF, but left after bringing the limited-edition LaFerrari hypercar to production. He spent less than 18 months at BMW’s Munich technical and development headquarters.

The Giulia’s much-hyped new architecture, which Alfa boasted set a lap record for mid-size sedans at the Nürburgring’s Nordschleife in testing, failed the EU’s front, side and rear crash tests, supplier sources told Automotive News Europe.

These failures are said to be behind the latest six-month delay in the Giulia’s arrival to market, leaving Alfa with just the Giulietta five-door hatch and the unloved MiTo three-door hatch to survive with.

To compound Fedeli’s difficulties, the Quattroporte and Ghibli have been languishing in sales after strong starts. Maserati is also deep in development for both the replacement for its ageing four-seat GranTurismo and GranCabrio large sports cars as well as turning its two-seat Alfieri concept car into a production reality.

There is even talk that continued civil war in Syria might force Maserati to dump the Levante name and the company has made approaches to Volkswagen to recover the Mistral name it used on sports cars in the 1970s.

While Levante is the Italian word for a piece of the Ligurian coastline near Genova, other historical definitions in other languages include the geographical name for Syria and Palestine and the French name for the area that covers Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Palestine, Cyprus and Turkey, at least five of which are bad-news hotspots today.