Forza Alfa Romeo: Tour of top-secret Skunkworks

Secret squirrel

We're lost. Despite being directed to an anonymous industrial estate on the outskirts of Modena, Alfa Romeo's sat-nav can't quite locate its own secret R&D hub.

It claims we're less than 100m away but without signs, corporate logos or anything even resembling a gate or entrance, we're stuck.

Waze and Google are no help and it's then that it strikes us: Alfa Romeo's Skunkworks doesn't want to be found.

After all, this is the top-secret facility where every new Alfa Romeo is born and holds the secrets for new models for decades to come.

Now blocking an impatient long line of big-rigs desperately trying to squeeze past our parked Stelvio, we circle the block in search of, hopefully, a Skunkworks employee driving an Alfa.

It doesn't take long. A confidently-driven Giulia QV spears off the road we're driving, so we follow and strike gold.

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Inauspicious greeting

From the outside, the glass and steel framed building will not win any architecture awards.

It looks more like a low-level IT firm's HQ than a global car-maker's engineering and design facility, but it's the car park that gives the game away and sharply focuses how lucky we are today.

You can't move for camouflaged prototypes from not just Alfa Romeo, but Maserati too. Most notable is the soon-to-be-launch Stelvio QV. There's at least 10 late-stage development models in various stages of distress. These cars have a hard life.

After signing my life away at the reception, we begin our tour and learn we're some of the first media to have ever crossed the threshold of these top-secret premises.

How the Skunkworks came about is fascinating. In fact, the story has become part of the Alfa Romeo legend.

The story goes that when the Italian car-maker presented its all-new replacement for the ageing 159 sedan and wagon to Sergio Marchionne, the Fiat Chrysler Automobiles CEO was so underwhelmed he terminated the entire car.

Instead of sending the Alfa Romeo engineers and designers back to the drawing board, Marchionne took the radical decision of calling up his close friends at Ferrari and making them an offer they couldn't refuse.

Their brief was to form a special-ops team of engineers and designers and create the next generation of Alfa Romeos without interference or hindrance from Alfa Romeo's management.

Hence the Skunkworks facility, which is part of an incredible €5 billion investment in Alfa, is located in the supercar heartland, not Milan, and why many of the employees here once worked for Ferrari or, indeed, still do.

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A little bit of Ferrari

It's no surprise then that, in reflection, with a clean-sheet design the Giulia switches to rear-wheel drive and gains a rigid, lightweight platform, using a mixture of aluminium and even carbon-fibre -- the basic building blocks for most Ferraris at the time.

Taking just two and half years to develop the Giulia from scratch (most car-makers take four to five years), the new facility is state-of-the-art and attracts some of the brightest minds in the European car industry.

Careful of what we might stumble across, our minders dash ahead of us, clearing any evidence of the next 4C or large sedan or big SUV (we suspect) Alfa is developing.

Our first stop highlights the firm's huge investment in virtual modelling, allowing real-world ergonomics testing on a mock buck.

These 'shortcuts' are how Alfa managed to cut huge amounts out of the Giulia's development, saving time at the actual 'prototype' stage.

A similar room also helps engineers and development drivers practice lapping the Nurburgring before the Giulia QV's physical prototype was finished, while much of the rest of the facility is concerned with improving quality and finish of the Alfas.

Of course, we couldn't film much of this small black-ops facility, but the passion and enthusiasm of everyone was self-evident.

It was a brave decision from FCA's CEO, who's known for both his bravery and ruthlessness, but in Alfa Romeo's case it's one that seems to have paid off.