Alfas move you

BLOOMING wind and rain – it's enough to have you looking forward to more snow.

Still, I did have a recent dull day brightened up for me courtesy of new Alfa Romeo dealer Le Mont Saint and its Giulietta demonstrator.

Re-reviving a famous name from the 50s – they used it again in the late 70s – Alfa launched their new C-segment contender to mark last year's centenary.

Alfas have always been beloved by road testers – and for more than their impressive competition history.

The sweet-handling Alfasud is widely credited as being the first hot hatch and is still the ultimate pocket rocket for many of us who remember it – but Alfa Romeo's success with the British car-buying public has been patchy.

Giulietta is aimed at changing that.

Not by getting common, though – perish the thought. Sales expectations are only around 5% of those of the Ford Focus.

But unlike the cutesy Alfa MiTo, Giulietta offers viable family transport inside that strikingly handsome five-door body.

You can have all the style without paying for too much of the substance, too – a 1.4 120PS turbo in Turismo trim can be in your driveway for a modest £14,711.

The mid-range petrol powerplant, the 1.4 turbocharged MultiAir, with its electronic valve control trickery and 170ps, is reckoned by fellow testers to strike a near-perfect balance between price, pace and being happy pottering around town.

And I am sure most of us could make do with the performance, dashing to the metric ton in under eight seconds on the way to an eventual 135mph.

There are diesel options, too: an entry-level 1.6 litre delivering 105bhp and a 2.0 litre pumping out 170bhp and pretty much mirroring the similarly-powerful petrol in performance.

There are three main trim and equipment grades: Turismo, Lusso and Veloce, with the entry-level trim offering just two engine choices: the least-powerful petrol and the less-powerful diesel.

Lusso and Veloce specifications bring all the kit you would expect and offer the choice of both the oil burners and both 1.4-litre petrols.

Then, at the top of the tree, there is the one for true Alfisti – the Cloverleaf.

And, bless 'em, that is what Le Mont Saint let me loose in.

The Quadrifoglio badge has denoted top-end Alfas for almost 90 years, the lucky four-leaf clover first appearing back on a racing Alfa in 1923 after driver Uvo Sivocci's frustrating spell of second places.

It worked. The clover leaf was presented to Ugo Sivocci just before that year's Targa Florio, which he duly won.

Its 1,750cc capacity mirrors that of classic Alfas going back more than 80 years and the stonking power and torque outputs more than justify resurrecting the Giulietta name.

The 1950s-60s Giulietta engine was phenomenally powerful for its size and day, delivering up to 118bhp from its 1,290cc.

A contemporary Mini Cooper S delivered 75bhp as it left the factory and in the 60s racers struggled to get 110bhp from it and generally lost any real-world driveability in the process.

In fact the Alfa twin cam was such a little cracker that it stayed in production in various guises and capacities of up to two litres well into the 1990s.

But back to 2011 and the new Giulietta Cloverleaf, for which Alfa Romeo claim the highest production engine specific power and torque outputs of 134bhp/litre and 143lb/ft/litre.

Sitting a little lower on its suspension than its siblings, the lithe, low Cloverleaf ticks all the boxes in the appearance stakes. Open a door and the promise keeps being fulfilled.

While it will look after the nuclear family – it achieved the highest Euro NCap crash test rating in its class and would earn five stars even under the still-harsher 2012 test – Alfa know they need to do more than just provide school-run transport.

And boy, have they ever.

Passengers are not shortchanged – unless a tall one wants to sit behind a tall driver, although it did pass the 'can I sit behind myself?' test quite easily.

The seats are comfortable and supportive – and while some leather-trimmed cars let themselves down away from the seat facings, the whole back and sides of the seats were catcher's mitt soft to the touch.

And families should find the boot space respectable and that there are adequate storage solutions scattered about the cabin.

But the focus is on the driver and, where traffic permits, their enjoyment.

They have even humoured we oddball types who sit on the right to drive by shifting the bonnet release to the driver's side – not that I had reason to delve, knowing what was under the hood. (Forgive the Americanism, but it avoided repetition of bonnet).

The seat and steering wheel are multi-adjustable and most should be able, like me, to settle in easily.

There has been criticism of the switch to right-hand drive depriving the driver of space to rest their clutch foot away from the pedal.

Hand on heart, it was not a problem for me and my size 10 trainers. In traffic, the foot hovered over the clutch as it normally does.

On clear roads – it was a quiet post-Xmas/New Year morning, so I did find a few – I just rested my left foot sole-flat-down on the carpet, knee bent in a semi dining-chair-sit position.

The kit is decent across the range and the top-billing Cloverleaf lacks nothing – except the stop/start system fitted to all other models.

Alfa's trademark chunky knobs regulate dual zone climate control and the fascia with its cowled main instruments and comprehensive trip computer is a masterful combination of style and function.

Cloverleaf comes with Fiat/Alfa's highly-praised Blue&Me system, with USB and Bluetooth hands-free worked by voice command or from the steering wheel and which can be integrated with the optional TomTom satnav.

And what doesn't need to function is totally stylish – like the dark sweep of brushed aluminium across the fascia.

Just one reservation: the trip-type minor switchgear – for fogs and locking, etc. – did not do it for me.

And one word of caution.

While you might think your licence is safe with the speedo needle sitting at nine o'clock, you are actually doing 50 and at 12 o'clock double that.

So watch yourself, the speed builds deceptively easy.

In fact, you can use all six forward gears and still avoid a speeding ticket – impressive for such a potent powerplant.

Remember that 134bhp/litre specific power output?

To save you doing the maths, it means there are 235 Euro horses hitting the road through the front wheels.

The Giulietta's DNA switch controls the driving experience.

A is all-weather – for when you intend making use of the ski hatch and taking to the snow-clad hills. It works well enough to keep Autocar's long-term Alfa on the road this winter.

N is for normal – speaks for itself, really, and few could wish for more than this delivers.

Few, that is, who have not tried the D for dynamic setting.

That sharpens throttle and steering response for the most involving and rewarding driving experience.

Some electronic trickery prevents you making an ass of yourself by reining things in a bit in the lower gears, and the 0-62mph time of 6.8 seconds is about as good as it gets for a front-drive hottie.

Driving it on a wet, pretty slippery day, I was impressed with how undramatically the power went down when pulling away from tricky junctions or low-speed corners quickly and without troubling the stability program.

Once off the line, in-gear acceleration is awesome and top speed a pretty academic 150mph.

At local speeds, it rides respectably enough on its 225/40 R18 Bridgestone Potenzas, which endow it with huge

cornering grip, and the steering is about as good,

weighty and feely as any modern electro-mechanical power-assisted system can possibly get.

To quote Henry Ford, 'When I see an Alfa Romeo go by, I tip my hat.'

Or as an Alfisto might have it: 'Ogni volta che uno va da Alfa, mi punta il mio cappello.'

If Henry were still with us, I suspect his titfer might be spending an increasing amount of time being tipped.