Alpine A110
Alpine’s bold intention for its new A110 is to create a lightweight sports car to rival the Porsche Cayman on track while remaining comfortable every day on the road. Dan Prosser hitches a ride to check on progress
We ride in the Porsche Cayman rival
If nothing else, you have to admire the audacity. For as long as the Porsche Cayman has roamed the world’s highways and back roads, no other manufacturer has yet had a proper go at it. Not with a sports car designed from a clean sheet of paper, at least. And now, from out of nowhere, in walks a revered company name from the past, its chiefs telling all and sundry how their own mid-engined, two-seat sports car is going to take on the 718 Cayman. That takes some nerve.
We’ve seen the A110 production car – the model that revives the famous Alpine name – on the stand at the Geneva motor show and we’ve heard all about its technical specifications, but until now we’ve known nothing at all about what the thing is actually like on the move. We won’t drive the car until October, but having spent a day riding in it at Renault’s Aubevoye test facility in the north of France, we can say it represents the biggest threat to the Cayman’s superiority since the Porsche arrived more than a decade ago. From the passenger seat at least, the little Alpine seems to be packed full of the right stuff.
Before we climb into the A110’s fixed-back bucket seat, though, chief engineer David Twohig and product planning director Eric Reymann take a few minutes to set the scene. “We started doing some customer clinics as far back as 2012,” says Reymann. “First with pure car guys – people who owned specific Porsches, Caterhams or Lotuses – and then with everybody else. We found there was an appetite for a sports car that could be comfortable to drive every day but which was also fun on the circuit.”
Twohig expands on that topic, explaining that the intention was to build a car that was a pleasure to drive on the road even at 40mph, “but is still bloody good when you do a track day every couple of months”. From there, Twohig and his team defined the A110’s technical specifications, placing lightness front and centre.
“If the car is light, it allows you to bring the spring rates down, so you don’t have a super-stiff car that’s a pain to drive every day,” he explains. “That’s why the A110’s body is aluminium.
“The second important thing is the suspension set-up. We’ve got double wishbones all-round, which is unusual in this class. The Cayman, for instance, has Macpherson struts on the front axle.”
It’s worth revisiting chapter one of the vehicle dynamics textbook here, because those double wishbones, as well as the lightweight build, really do underpin every one of the A110’s dynamic characteristics. Double wishbones allow the engineers to control wheel camber in hard cornering, whereas a less-sophisticated strut arrangement does not. By controlling wheel camber, the car keeps a tyre’s contact patch
Hurgon drives the A110 with such commitment that it is hard to believe the car is so dainty
flat to the road surface, rather than allowing it to ‘fall over’ into positive camber, where it can’t grip effectively. In a car with strut suspension, that can be addressed by fitting big anti-roll bars to stop the body leaning over in bends – but that simply ruins the ride quality.
“Because we have double wishbones all round, we don’t have to fight against body roll,” explains Twohig. “It’s why the A110 uses very small, hollow anti-roll bars, which are really good for the ride.”
With weight kept to a minimum – just 1080kg at the kerb – and that double-wishbone layout, the foundations of a good sports car are in place. The A110 should be agile and grippy (even on relatively modest Michelin Pilot Sport 4 tyres), with a pliant ride quality and good body control.
Let’s dive deeper. The A110’s suspension arrangement, says Twohig, gives it best-in-class camber linearity. That makes it progressive at the limit, not spikey and unpredictable. During hard cornering the toe angle adjusts to slight toe-out, which gives gentle understeer characteristics and means there’s a safety margin built in. The chassis balance can therefore be tuned to be neutral or even oversteery, all of which makes for a car that’s fun and adjustable at low and medium speeds while being stable and secure at high speeds. We call that the Holy Grail.
It’s worth noting, though, that double-wishbone suspension isn’t without its drawbacks, mostly relating to packaging. A strut arrangement would have enabled a bigger front storage compartment, for one thing, but it’s encouraging to know Alpine’s priorities are as they should be.
There aren’t many people better equipped to demonstrate the A110’s dynamic ability than racing and development driver Laurent Hurgon, and there can’t be many better places to experience the car on the limit than Aubevoye’s high-speed test track. Hurgon pilots the A110 with such commitment around the flowing track – which links terrifyingly fast bends with tight, complex corners – that it is hard to believe the A110 is so dainty and benign-looking. It feels wild.
Straight-line performance is strong – Alpine claims 0-62mph in 4.5sec, which is Cayman S pace – and there’s even an authentic sports car soundtrack from the 1.8-litre turbocharged fourpot and single-exit active sports exhaust.
The most extreme of three driving modes, Track, allows a certain amount of slip – enough that the car will drift slightly in low-speed corners, but not beyond that – and with the stability systems switched off the car will hold long, lurid and very progressive slides.
It also feels amazingly agile and responsive in direction changes while being safe and stable at high speed. Over rougher sections of the track, that pliant ride quality is plain to feel; few cars combine body control and ride quality as well as this.
Does any of that actually make the A110 fun to drive? For now, we just don’t know. What we do know, though, is that going after the Cayman is an extraordinarily brave thing to do. Until this ride, it seemed potentially foolhardy too, but on this evidence we just might have a fight on our hands.