Sexy, eye-catching Giulia QV
It is the awesome 2.9l, twin-turbo V6 petrol engine, 376kW, which sets it apart. THERE IS NOTHING ON EARTH QUITE LIKE AN ALFA ROMEO V6
The first time I fell in love, I was an awkward teen who had limited his romantic encounters up to then to solitary bicycle rides up and down past the place the American girl lived (her parents were missionaries, so you could say she was Heaven-sent).
I never said a word to her and even enjoyed it when she beat me into second place in class, getting a much more expensive book as a prize. Yes, pathetic ...
That was not real love, though – I knew that even then.
The real thing, though, was peering through the driver’s window at the interior of an Alfa Romeo Giulia with some schoolmates on a languid lunchtime on the way to afternoon school.
The large speedo looked impossibly gorgeous, as if a supermodel had rocked up at a school dance. Wow! The numbers went to 140mph! – that’s about 240km/h in today’s measures. Then, next to that was an equally sexy dial, with graduated numbers in 10s, from 0 to 80. The dial said, simply: Giri and then “x100”. Another supermodel moment. In those days, cars were workaday appliances, with boring ribbon speedos and, if you were lucky, a temperature gauge to go along with your fuel indicator.
An Alfa Romeo, though, came from a racetrack – and an Italian racetrack at that. It had what we discovered was a rev counter, to keep track of your engine, as opposed to your road speed. There was a beautiful painted red arc, which started just after the 60 figures (6 000rpm) and which went all the way to 8 000.
Not long after that, as I pored over car magazines for Alfa features, I actually got to ride in a car which has remained one of my all-time favourites, an Alfa 1750 GT. Burned into my memory is the sight of the speedo needle, which I could see from my hunched-up position behind the driver, hitting 100mph. It was more than a decade before I went that fast again.
Tomorrow, Sunday of June 24, so I see from an Alfa press release, is the 108th anniversary of the brand, making it one of the longest-lived in the auto industry. It’s twice as old as Ferrari, to give you some perspective. When Alfas were challenging for the equivalent of the Formula One championship before World War II, Porsche did not exist.
I was expecting a lot from the Alfa Romeo Giulia QV (which stands for Quadrofoglio Verde, or Green Clover Leaf – Alfa’s top performance sub-brand), which, for the first time in many decades enables this Italian sports carmaker to take on, and beat, supercars. Yet, the Giulia looks like an executive sedan – eye-catching and sexy, in the Alfa style but a four-door saloon nevertheless.
The test car, which we had for a limited number of days, was in that stunning Alfa red. Standing still, it looked like a work of art... Not disappointed so far ...
It is the awesome 2.9 litre, twin-turbo V6 petrol engine, which puts out 376kW, which sets it apart. The Guilia QV will rip to 100km/h in well under four seconds in “Race” mode and probably something around 280km/h flat out. Formula One cars weren’t that quick in the days when I peeped through that first Alfa Guilia’s window.
But it is the way the engine goes about its work which makes the Alfa special. There is nothing on Earth quite like an Alfa Romeo V6 and previous, non-turbo’d motors in this configuration have made noises like few other machines on the road.
Normally, turbocharging mutes the voice of an engine, because of the extra piping and force feeding ... but in this case, the Alfa engineers have managed to keep its screaming, racetrack sound. Coupled with the sports settings in the performance modes (Sport is all I risked during my time with the car, because Race dares you to make a fool of yourself), the engine splutters, barks and blows off boost pressure like a race car.
Yet, inside, squeezed into the real carbon fibre-shelled sports seats, facing more gorgeous Alfa gauges, you feel at home. The driving position is still pretty Italian and you need to adjust things quite a bit to get comfortable.
The Giulia QV is so much more than the sum of its parts.
It’s exclusive, it’s expensive (R1.8 million or so).
But it will win your heart ...