HOW TO TURN A ROUGH DIAMOND INTO A WORLD- BEATING PERFORMANCE CAR

WE DROVE THE A110 AT TWO DISTINCTLY different stages of its development. The first time was towards the end of 2016, and to be honest we weren’t massively impressed by what we found. Which was basically a car that needed a lot of polish administering to make it even remotely competitive with a Porsche Cayman. The steering wasn’t quite there in terms of feel or precision, the paddleshifters for the dual-clutch gearbox lacked definition and the shift itself felt turgid as a result.

There was more. The exhaust note wasn’t quite right and there was too much travel on the brake pedal and a bit too much lag from the turbocharged engine. We relayed all of this without any sugar-coating to Alpine’s enthusiastic engineers and specifically to chief engineer David Twohig, who took it on the chin and basically said: ‘Trust me, I know we’re not there yet but we will get there eventually, because we know where we need to end up.’

Six months later we went back to try the A110 again, this time on both road and track near Lyon, and the weather chucked it down for most of our stay. But this time pretty much everything about the A110 had been improved. Hugely so. Alpine MD Michael van der Sande was there, as was Twohig and his two main assistants, Renaud Hantz (powertrain) and Terry Baillon (chassis). We spent two days howling around in two different preproduction A110s plus a Mégane Trophy R as a reference for how quick the A110 was.

The answer to that was ‘very’. The A110 could drop the Trophy R easily, on road or track, but that wasn’t the main issue. What mattered was that the A110’s gearchange was much better, much snappier, its chassis and steering in particular had finally hit their sweetspots, the brakes felt far crisper and the power delivery now had an edge to it that wasn’t there before. One of the cars we drove had the old-spec paddles, the other the new spec, and the difference was chalk and cheese. Otherwise, both cars were pretty close to production specification bar a few quality issues, and they both drove quite beautifully, on road and track.

I came away thinking that van der Sande and his team might just have a world-beater on their hands, and, having now driven the full production version, I’m quietly confident that Alpine, with perhaps just a tiny bit of help from evo, has delivered just that.