Alfa Romeo undercooks saucy 4C
The Alfa Romeo 4C is the most exciting car from the serpent-brand for yonks. But it would be better if it was finished, says Paul Owen.
There’s plenty to like about the Alfa Romeo 4C. It looks fab from the outside, and anticipation builds as you open the driver’s door and view the carbon-fibre door sills and frames.
When you climb in, arse first, you get to sit way down low in a cockpit that resembles Brendon Hartley’s office when he does business for the Porsche World Endurance Championship team. You then pull the door shut with a black leather strap embroidered with red stitching that wouldn’t look out of place in the dungeon of a dominatrix.
Firing up the engine unleashes the sounds of the world’s fruitiest four-cylinder turbocharged engine, located just behind your head in the interests of cornering balance rather than to allow front-row access to the explosive drama that’s about to act out back there.
Psychologically, the Alfa has already won you over at this point.
If you noticed the slight corrosion of the door hinges on the way in, you’d concede that this is just an essential element of the brand DNA rather than something genuinely offensive.
If you don’t like the compound eyes of the headlights, you’d shrug this off by allowing that they probably produce a seriously wide zone of enlightenment at night.
There’s some exposed wiring behind an otherwise perfectly-presented alloy pedal box, but what the hey, this could be dismissed as proof of the 4C’s obsession with weight-saving detail. A cover would have added several more grams of mass to a car that can count its kilograms using just three figures.
The real glory of the 4C is found in the 955kg kerb weight figure. Sure, you can probably safely add another 100kg by adding fuel and allowing for the poetic licence of the Alfa Romeo marketing department, but even when adjusting the figure for exaggeration there is no mistaking that the 4C possesses a lightness of driving rivalled by only a few cars in the marketplace. Several of these rivals for any prize for automotive anorexia bear the Lotus brand, and only a single Japanese-branded car qualifies – the latest ND-generation Mazda MX-5.
Building a car with a carbonfibre tub linking aluminium subframes and clad in lightweight composite body parts, was always going to make the 4C stress the scales as much as a supermodel addicted to smack, but the surprising bit is that it comes with plenty of occupant conveniences and comforts.
The seats are roomy and generously upholstered, and there’s air-conditioning, an audio system, and the six-speed gearbox possesses two clutches so that it can have an automatic shift function for when you just want to mooch around the ‘burbs instead of setting a country road on fire.
Alfa could have saved a further 50kg by making the 4C engage just a single-clutch manual gearbox instead, and driving purists would have applauded the move.
Instead, the nod from Alfa to said sportscar traditionalists comes with the total lack of steering assistance in the 4C. This is minimalism taken a deletion too far, and presumably Alfa Romeo felt encouraged to adopt such a radical piece of product planning because steering commando-style was once considered an essential element of sporty 20th-century motoring. But we’ve come a long way since then, and electric power steering systems can now be used for other stuff than just the promotion of easier parking and low-speed manoeuvring. For example, they can successfully tame bump and camber-steer on our highly-crowned backroads, as just about every recent Holden that I’ve driven proves.
And this is the environment where the 4C patently fails. I can accept heavy steering at low speeds if it results in an engaging driving experience full of communicative feedback at higher velocities that lives up to everything expected of a midengine Latin sportscar. The trouble with the 4C is that it’s a little too engaging and communicative when driven far from the flatter, smoother surfaces of Europe. It doesn’t just tell you about the bumps that the steering wheels encounter, it surrenders to them. The driver must then constantly fight the road surface to control the direction the car is headed in. It’s tiresome.
Which is a pity, as the 4C is just an electric power steering system short of true greatness. With 60 per cent of its mass located over the driving wheels, it can translate it’s 177KW of power and 350Nm of force into effective acceleration with an efficiency matched by few cars. And a 0-100kmh time of less than five seconds has possibly never been achieved before by using so little fuel.
Smooth surfaced corners are dispatched with an inspiring building of lateral-g force that then starts to fade as the front end of the 4C progressively succumbs to understeer. A little relaxation of steering lock or throttle pressure will instantly get them holding the preferred cornering line again, a car-and-driver play that’s likely to never get old when piloting the Alfa at a track-day.
So, what we have in the $139,900 Alfa Romeo 4C Coupe is something of a flawed jewel. It’s great to see the much-misunderstood division of Fiat boldly swinging to hit home runs in the sportscar ball game again, but the Euro-centric nature of the end product misses the global target.