► Inside Alfa
► Why is it such a cult brand?
► What’s next?
Newcastle United recently pulled off a shock win in UK football’s Carabao Cup, demolishing Premier League leaders Liverpool to break a 57-year run in which the only silverware they took home was spoon-shaped and made of wood. Most of the NUFC supporters weren’t even born when the Magpies last lifted a cup, but somehow the mythology of the club’s 1950s heyday and occasional flashes of brilliance since then have kept the brand alive and loved. Fans willing to overlook the disappointments have kept on hoping each year that this season might be the one. Fans at the other big clubs probably wondered why they bothered.
Alfa Romeo’s dry spells have never been quite that arid, but it’s not hard to see the parallels. Here’s a brand with a rich history and passionate fan base, but one whose tales of straight-armed derring-do are mostly now so far away in the hat-wearing past it’s as if they were pulled off by an entirely different company (many were, before the 1986 sale to Fiat). A brand whose succession of new managers have promised much but frequently left the club hovering above the relegation zone. A brand that ought to be Italy’s BMW, but sells around one car for every 37 the Munich manufacturer does. A brand that most modern car buyers simply don’t get.
So what is it about Alfa that keeps a small but dedicated band of fans coming back for more? What is it that convinces the company’s owners it’s worth persevering with when financial results say otherwise? And why can’t Alfa sell more cars?
To understand Alfa Romeo, you have to start at the track. The brand might have flunked out of F1 in 2023, having failed to win a single race in five years of trying, but it has plenty of other victories to crow about if you’re prepared to cast the net a little further back. Because for much of the last century the history of Alfa was the history of motorsport.
Born in 1910 as ALFA (Anonima Lombarda Fabbrica Automobili), the company began fielding cars in the legendary Targa Florio Sicilian road race as soon as the following year. It scored its first win there in 1923 with the now iconic ‘Quadrifoglio’ four-leaf-clover logo on the bonnet, and in 1925 bagged the inaugural Automobile World Championship, the precursor to the modern F1 Championship. Alfa went on to become one of the dominant names in Grand Prix racing through the rest of that decade and into the early 1930s until the irritatingly winning Germans spoiled the fun (and not for the last time).
Starting in the late 1940s, when racing battles once again replaced the guns, tanks and bombs type, Alfa recovered its winning mojo, claiming the maiden F1 season in 1950 and repeating the feat a year later. Then, short of funds and feeling the heat from a certain Enzo Ferrari – who got his break racing for Alfa Romeo, ran its team and then founded his own – Alfa recused itself.
It changed tack, doubled down on racing sports cars and saloons, beat Porsche in the Trans Am series and crushed the class opposition in European Touring Car competition in the 1960s, ’70s and early ’80s. It added another hat trick of ETCC titles in the first three years of the new millennium and peppered the half century-long post-war period with a couple of Sportscar world championships, class victories at Le Mans, Sebring and the Nürburgring, and the odd rally win. No question, Alfa’s motorsport pedigree is blue-chip stuff, if now a little chipped around the edges with age.
It’s not just racing that cemented the legend. Alfa Romeo has given us some of the most achingly beautiful road cars in history, often leveraging the talents of legendary Italian design houses like Pininfarina, Zagato and Bertone, and later, proving that its own Centro Stile in-house team was every bit as capable. From the 6Cs of the 1930s and ’40s to the 33 Stradale of the 1960s, and the 8C earlier this century, Alfas often rub shoulders with Ferrari and Aston Martin in beauty polls.
Its name has graced some of the craziest concepts, too, including Nuccio Bertone’s BAT studies and Marcello Gandini’s Carabo, effectively a dry run for his more famous Lamborghini Countach. And the cars you could buy for vaguely real-world money were often also beautiful, while those that weren’t – like the SZ, 75 and 166 – were at least interesting.
Appearances on the silver screen only helped reinforce the legend. Who approaching pensionable age can forget The Graduate’s Dustin Hoffman running out of petrol in his rush to halt Katherine Ross’s wedding, Roger Moore and a BMW-beating GTV6 giving Octopussy its one redeeming feature, and Bond again, this time being chased by 159s in Quantum of Solace? Or Edward Fox repainting his Giulietta Spider midway through the Day of the Jackal to evade the police – and maybe just deal with some of those typical Alfa rust spots.
And there was almost always engineering substance to go with that glamour, much of it developed through racing. Alfa was using twin-cam heads when plenty of American and European firms were still pushing side-valve motors. Equipping its sports saloons with rear transaxles for perfect weight distribution – just like front-engined Ferraris – and five-speed transmissions when nose-heavy rivals had only four. Adjusting valve timing on the fly years before anyone had heard of VTEC, and rocking smooth, sophisticated common-rail power when everyone else was still peddling rattly, smoky old-tech diesels.
Some of the innovations never quite took off, like the Q-System H-pattern shifter for the 166’s four-speed automatic transmission (the idea’s primed for a comeback in the EV age via Toyota). But the same era’s Selespeed sequential manual presaged a DSG revolution, and even the ideas that didn’t hit at least showed that Alfa was always thinking about the driver.
It’s a shame it wasn’t always thinking about the owner at the same time. Cars like the boxer-engined Sud were great to drive but quality issues wrecked the entire brand’s reputation for years. The hit-and-miss design and dynamics that characterised the following years didn’t help. The 1980s and early ’90s had their highs (164) and lows (the weird Nissan Cherry-based Arna) and a load of cars like the 33, 145 and 155 that were good in parts but lacking overall.
You could level the same complaint at the Mito and Giulietta, but for most of the past 25 or so years Alfas have looked great and generally had the chassis moves to back up the swagger. From the 156 that put the company back on the map in 1998 to the modern Giulia and Stelvio, the cars haven’t always been perfect in detail, but they’ve made us lust after them, and love driving them, even if too few of us acted on those urges. The base cars hit the spot, but the Quadrifoglio versions were knockout good.
Ask an accountant, and they’ll tell you Alfa should have died years ago. Judging by the sales figures, too many of its devotees have already had the AA truck drop them at the pearly gates.
In 2001, riding high after a successful reboot that gave us the gorgeous 156 saloon and son-of-Sud 147 (and with them Alfa’s first two Car of the Year gongs), Alfa sold 213,000 cars. Not bad, but definitely room for improvement: then-FCA boss Sergio Marchionne reckoned 500k was in reach by the middle of the decade. It never happened. Not even close.
Last year Alfa sold around 65,000 cars, down from more than 70,000 in 2023, and that’s with the benefit of access to the huge US market, something off-limits in the 156’s day, Alfa having bailed on America in 1995. To give you an idea of how bad the situation is, Porsche, supposedly a niche player, sold almost 51,000 examples of the 911 alone in 2024, and more than 300,000 cars overall. BMW pulled in over 2.2 million customers in the same 12-month period.
Some of the blame can be laid on the Italians’ limited line-up. BMW and Audi have more than a dozen different models when Alfa had only three during most of 2024. Even Porsche has eight. Alfa also has only one plug-in hybrid, and didn’t get an EV until the Junior launched last year, a launch as memorable for the embarrassing post-debut name change from Milano at the behest of the indignant city of the same name as for the electric bit.
I know the idea will horrify Alfa diehards, but you have to wonder if Alfa would be better off in BMW’s hands, or VW’s. Think of the platforms and tech it could have easily accessed over the past decade. It could have happened. Back in 2018 a VW team approached Alfa’s then owner FCA about acquiring the company on the urging of former boss Ferdinand Piech, the man who had masterminded VW’s massively successful takeovers of Bentley, Lamborghini and Bugatti, and who a few years earlier had suggested Alfa could flourish under Porsche’s control. FCA knocked them back, believing it could turn Alfa round; and now, in Cupra, VW has created its own Alfa Romeo. One that shifted almost 250,000 cars last year.
Loving Alfa Romeo has rarely been logical; it’s been about making memories, the kind you don’t make in a gussied-up Seat. My personal odometer just ticked past 50 years and I must have driven thousands of cars in that time. Most of them I’ve forgotten, but not the raspy 33 I worked on as a mechanic in the 1990s or the used V6-powered GTV I bought for then editor Phil McNamara as part of our July 2010 ‘We Love Alfa!’ issue (he loved it less when it very quickly, expensively went wrong). And in years to come I’ll remember the pop of the Montreal Green paint and physics-defying B-road fireworks of the Stelvio Quadrifoglio I ran for six months long after I’ve expunged the awful ride and ropey media system from my memory banks.
But Cupra’s recent rise – or Audi’s longer-term one – proves most modern buyers don’t care about heritage that comes in Pathé film canisters and don’t want to have to excuse flaws as ‘character.’ They want cars that look good and feel relatively polished in all respects, even if they’re not always as exciting to drive as machines like the Giulia. The fact that Alfa has amassed a huge 30,000-unit order bank for the new Junior suggests it’s on their wavelength and Stellantis was right to hang onto the brand.
If Alfa maintains that incredible momentum with the upcoming electric and combustion Giulia, Stelvio and its planned Porsche Cayenne-sized big brother, there’s a chance my kids won’t be boring their kids about why Alfa Romeo still matters. They’ll already know. And if they do it’ll be because of what Alfa has achieved this century, not what it did in the last.
Sounds wildly over-optimistic? Isn’t that what loving Alfa is all about?
Chris has written for CAR magazine since the turn of the millennium – and continues to contribute to this day. A wry observer of the car industry, Chris specialises in car reviews, leftfield features and news stories about interesting and alternative corners of the automotive firmament.
By Chris Chilton
Contributing editor, ace driver, wit supplier, mischief maker
