A WARP-SPEED FAMILY SEDAN
Alfa Romeo’s seductive Giulia Quadrifoglio has a few tricks up its sleeve thanks to its big brother, Ferrari, writes David Booth.
SONOMA RACEWAY, CALIF. It must be great having Ferrari as a big brother. The hand-me-downs are beyond wonderful. For one thing, you get all the test answers with no pesky homework. Philippe Krief — creator of the 458 who returned to Ferrari as chief technical officer — was seconded as chief designer of the Alfa Romeo Giulia’s Giorgio platform and with him, the full knowledge of everything that makes Ferrari the super-est of cars.
That means getting an almost perfect 50:50 weight distribution, which is the most basic of building blocks for any sports sedan worth its Pirelli PZeros. You also get an almost impossibly quick steering box the likes of which imbued the 458, F12 et al with such delicate steering. Even the small, quickly accessed red starter button in the corner of the Giulia’s steering wheel is fun, as castoffs go, making you feel like you’re about to blast down Le Mans’ famed Mulsanne straight in a supercar rather than just toodling down to the corner grocery store in a family sedan.
But the best hand-me-down of all, that which makes being part of the now vast FCA empire worthwhile, is the Giulia QV’s Ferrari-derived engine. To most aspiring luxury automakers, engineering a V6 by lopping off two cylinders from a larger displacement V8 — think big brother’s pants hemmed or waistline cinched — would be a thrift-store hand-me-down too far. But when the older sibling is Ferrari and the cylinders you’re lopping off belong to the all-conquering 488 supercar, then “pre-owned” really does mean “pre-loved.”
And, if losing two pistons still results in 505 romping, stomping horsepower, then second-hand is good enough for first place in the entry-level performance sedan segment. Thus does Alfa Romeo’s new Giulia Quadrifoglio, powered by a twin turbo, 2.9-litre V6 based on Ferrari’s 3.9-L V8, find itself easily topping the BMW M3’s piffling 425 ponies and even powering past the MercedesAMG C63’s 469 horsepower.
So the Giulia has pedigree. But does it have bona fides?
Well, the engine certainly is mighty. Alfa says that the 505-hp Quadrifoglio gobbles up 100 km/h in just 3.9 seconds. That makes the Giulia QV the quickest small sports sedan in the land. And judging by the way it eats through the gears in the ZF eightspeed automatic transmission (a six-speed manual is available in Europe, but seems unloved even there) there’s no reason to doubt the turbo Giulia’s turn of speed. It suffers not an iota of turbo lag and generally makes the M3 feel like a 328 every time the tachometer zooms past 3,500 rpm.
In another segment first, it tops out at an incredible-for-what-isjust-an-$80,000-family-sedan 315 km/h. So says a positively beaming Reid Bigland, once chief of FCA Canada but now the big cheese for Alfa Romeo worldwide. That’s 197 miles per hour, folks, the kind of alacrity normally associated with Lamborghini and McLaren. Not even Mercedes’ S version of the C63 AMG boasts such an incredible turn of speed.
Of course, there’s more to performance than just horsepower and here, too, Alfa Romeo has more “firsts” to trumpet. The Quadrifoglio is — cue the drum roll — the fastest sedan of any kind, shape or price round the Nurburgring. Alfa swears that its most potent Giulia can twist and shout its way around the famed Nordschleife’s 73 corners in a mere 7:32.
For those of you lacking the requisite encyclopedic memory of automotive lap records to be impressed, allow me to lay a little perspective on you: seven minutes and thirty-two seconds is faster than a Lamborghini LP700-4 can circumnavigate the Ring’s 20 or so kilometres. I don’t mean the poseur’s Huracán that Lambo foists on young hedge-fund managers. I’m talking about the fire-breathing, V12-powered Aventador, the one with 700 hp and all-wheel drive.
As for its direct four-door sedan competition, nothing even comes close. Oh, AMG claims its C63 can clip a 7:45 lap. But that’s for the limited production “Black” series, hardly representative of most C63s on the road. Meanwhile, a current M4 coupe is 20 seconds slower than the Alfa and it’s lighter than the more directly comparable M3 sedan. And the best a Porsche Panamera can do is 24 seconds in arrears. Credit firm suspension and the incredible grip of Pirelli PZero Corsas in supercar sizes — 245/35ZR19 front and 285/30ZR19 rear — for cornering that would make a Nissan GT-R jealous. Add in (optional) carbon ceramic Brembo discs and a torque-vectoring rear differential (no pansy all-wheel drive for the Quadrifoglio) for a veritable track weapon.
With a price tag promised to be under US$70,000 (no hint of a Canadian price tag has been mentioned yet), that would seem to make the Quadrifoglio nigh on perfect then, right? Well, not quite. The Giulia is, after all, an Alfa. Which, in turn, makes it Italian. Which, almost by definition, means it has to be at least a little flawed, if not wildly eccentric.
That eccentricity is the Chassis Domain Control system, essentially the electronic safety nanny that keeps dweebs like you and me from oversteering 505-hp of rear-wheel-drive super-ish car into the nearest ditch. The problem is that the Quadrifoglio’s version of CDC can’t decide between being too nanny-ing or adopting a completely laissez faire attitude toward bumbling overenthusiasm, er, traction management.
Flip the DNA controller into its most liberal setting that still maintains some form of that electronic safety net and all those sensors and controllers are still, well, too controlling. Throttle out of a high-speed corner in “Dynamic” mode and those bloody electrons will sufficiently stunt the turbochargers huffing and puffing to make the QV feel lethargic. The solution would seem to be to simply toggle up one more notch to the “Race” mode. The problem here however, is that the DNA’s brain now believes you are a competent track warrior and switches all those safety devices completely off. That’s right! No stability control. No traction control. Not a darned thing between you and guardrail Armageddon.
Such broad-mindedness might work for Fabio Francia, the Alfa engineer/track magician who recorded that 7:32 miracle and also gave me a little taste of what the Quadrifoglio can do in Race mode. But for you, me, and pretty much anyone else who might drive the new Alfa, it’s a recipe for disaster. I tried “Race”-ing the Quadrifoglio for a couple of laps and, though it indeed displayed the little Alfa’s engine in a much more flattering light, the immediate throttle response gave me visions of guardrails past.
What’s needed is an intermediate step, something between the overly cautious “Dynamic” and the fully unfettered “Race.” This might seem like the picking of the tiniest nits, but the Quadrifoglio and all cars of its ilk trade on the track cred and this overnannying of the safety gizmos is the pumped-up Giulia’s biggest on-track flaw.
Interestingly, the other car that most dramatically suffers from this quantum jump between traction modes is none other than the Quadrifoglio’s most direct competition, BMW’s M3.
But guess who is the acknowledged master of finely-attenuated traction control systems? Who knows how to perfectly meter out just the right amount of torque at exactly the right time? Ferrari.
I guess big brother didn’t share all his secrets.