Alfa Romeo 4C

Now with small wheels and ‘comfort’

The Alfa 4C? That’s been out ages… It has been on sale for a year in the UK now, but this is the frst time we’ve been able to drive one with smaller wheels and the Comfort chassis set-up (no rear antiroll bar, softer springs and dampers).

Why would you want to do that? Um, how to put this nicely? Maximally sportifed, it wasn’t very good. At all. It weaved and dived under braking, tramlined alarmingly, had an overly excitable turbo and odd gearbox calibration, numb brakes with an inconsistent pedal and rode with almost no dexterity at all. I could go on. But I won’t. Sufce it to say there’s a reason we never took it on our PCOTY test (issue 258).

So this one rectifes all the bad stuf? No, almost none of it, in fact. Sigh. I take no pleasure in writing this, because I wanted the Alfa 4C to be so good, to really stick it to the Germans, but aside from more forgiveness in the ride, slightly improved traction and a touch less sensitivity to road camber, the basics of the chassis behaviour haven’t changed enough. The inch-smaller wheels (17 and 18 respectively) still look cool, too. You don’t notice they’re smaller because

But doesn’t that just mean it’s engaging and fun? Not when the car is fghting against you rather than with you, no. It still feels as if fnal development work is yet to occur in pretty much every area, from seat design to damping. But I’d put up with all that if the 4C was rich in character, but it isn’t – the turbo engine just whooshes about. It’s so efective through the midrange that there’s no reason to hang on to see if the noise gets any better higher up (it doesn’t). All told, the 4C still feels like a poorly targeted device.