Living Legende
What cars motoring journalists actually spend their own money on can be worth knowing. Many of my contemporaries and mates in the business use the fact we’re always driving and testing new cars provided by manufacturers as an excuse to have something really impractical of their own. Or just daft.
My mate Richard, who worked at British Leyland before he became a journalist, has got an Austin Princess, an Allegro and a 1961 Mini in his collection.
A mutual friend of ours has a pre-war Singer and a Hillman Imp.
But if you asked me to name the most common car owned by hacks it would be the Porsche 911. I had one for years and many of my mates have had them come and go.
Right now, though, it’s not Porsches that are the darlings, it is the Alpine A110 built by Renault’s sports car arm. Four journalists I know own Alpines and two of them bought them new. On top of that, another three friends who are car nuts but not journalists also own Alpines.
I’d join them now if I had the spare cash.
Later this year, Alpine is going to facelift the A110 – a car it first made in the 1960s, as pictured below. We don’t know the details but I suspect the changes will be quite small, probably just slight styling tweaks and a fiddle with the equipment list.
In the meantime, Alpine has made some changes to the car for the 2022 model year. The big one is to the flagship A110 Legende GT we’re testing today.
The previous version had a more powerful engine than the standard car and a bespoke suspension set-up that was on the stiff side of sporty.
This car, however, has a 1.8-litre turbocharged engine with 290PS as found in the A110 S version. Even 290PS is perfectly adequate since the
A110 Pure, which is the entry-level model, has 255PS and that’s more than fast enough.
The Alpine’s appeal is not that it is quick, which it is, but that it is wonderful to drive at any speed. The feedback is very direct and you feel like you’re part of the car.
The exact opposite, in other words, of driving an SUV. It’s like being in a Caterham Seven but without the poor heater, complicated and sometime leaky roof and lack of comforts.
The Alpine is more like a Lotus
Elise but is easier to live with day to day, not least because it’s easier to get in and out of.
Like a Lotus, the A110 has a very comfortable ride and almost floats over bumps. Stiffening the suspension on the last Legende GT might have made the car better suited to the race track but it spoilt the car on the road.
This latest version combines the best of all worlds – a little bit more power, the standard supple suspension, yet it includes the larger brakes and sports exhaust of the old model.
The only thing that stops this latest Legende GT being the perfect A110 is its price.
At £61,655 it is worryingly expensive. That’s not too big an issue when you consider how brilliant it is, but the problem lies in the fact that the most basic Alpine A110 Pure is more than £10,000 cheaper – and that car is every bit as good.
It’ll be the version that I hope one day ends up outside my house. In purple with gold wheels just like my mate Steve’s.