ALFA ROMEO

The day Alfa Romeo lost its soul: how the takeover of Fiat saved the Milanese giant, but changed everything!

Although almost forty years have passed since that historic moment, the sale of Alfa Romeo to Fiat in 1986 is still the subject of heated debate among motoring enthusiasts. It was a turning point that forever changed the fate of the famous Milanese brand, saving it from economic collapse, but also depriving it of the authentic technical identity that true “Alfistas” adored.

In the mid-1980s, Alfa Romeo was owned by the state-owned IRI institute and was struggling with huge debts. The factories were recording heavy losses, so the Italian state was desperately looking for a buyer. First in line was the American giant Ford with an extremely ambitious plan for investment, development of new models and a global revival of the Milanese brand. Ford’s then president, Donald Petersen, believed that the job was practically done.

Ford was on the verge of taking over, and then politics intervened... However, the very thought that a powerful American concern could enter Italian soil and threaten the primacy in Turin alarmed Fiat. The Agnelli family and the Turin group put strong pressure on political and trade union circles to find an "Italian solution". In the end, the head of IRI, Romano Prodi, accepted Fiat's offer - Alfa was sold for 1,050 billion lire, with a very favorable deferred payment that caused controversy years later.

While on the economic front, joining the Turin group brought salvation and stability, on the engineering front an era of costly rationalization began. Solutions that were the very core of Alfa's philosophy gradually disappeared, such as rear-wheel drive and the specific "Transaxle" scheme that adorned legendary models like the Alfa 75, or four-cylinder engines with two camshafts (Twin-Cam).

Alfa was sold for 1.050 billion lire...Also, the unique mechanical platform developed exclusively in Milan disappeared. The Alfa 155 is often cited as a symbol of this transformation, which, under its beautiful and sporty bodywork, shared a complete architecture with popular models such as the Fiat Tipo and Tempra. However, the era under Fiat did not only bring negative things. From this collaboration, fantastic, extremely successful models such as the Alfa 164 were born, and later the 156 and 147, which won over both customers and the expert jury for the Car of the Year, while maintaining their recognizable charm and excellent driving characteristics.

Bright spots and the wait for the Giulia for 30 years...However, the "Alfisti" had to wait until 2016 for a real return to their roots and a rear-wheel drive sedan to see the light of day.

Today, Alfa Romeo is part of the mega-conglomerate Stellantis, and new models like the Tonal and Junior bring the necessary sales and survival of the brand in the market. However, for many car history lovers, 1986 still remains a reminder of the moment when Alfa lost a part of its rebellious soul.

Does the Alfa Romeo soul still beat? Magneto heads to Varano to find out...There is a distinct romance to the Varano de’ Melegari circuit when the Emilia-Romagna skies open up and deliver a steady, clinging drizzle. It’s here, deep in Italy’s Motor Valley, that the ghosts of motor sport past seem to hang in the tyre smoke. Memories of past glories, victories and battles across the Tarmac. Nostalgia indeed – it’s the life blood that keeps Alfa Romeo going. It’s also here that the marque has renewed its ties with Scuderia de Adamich, creating the Alfa Romeo Driving Academy.

Building on a collaboration that stretches back to 1991, when former Formula 1 driver Andrea de Adamich helped establish the Centro Internazionale Guida Sicura, the long-established driving school has been rebranded as Alfa Romeo Driving Academy powered by Scuderia de Adamich. With professional instructors overseeing Safe, Advanced, Sports and Advanced Driving programmes, it is now a showcase for Alfa’s current line-up, blending road-safety nous with high-performance driving. But as we arrived at the damp paddock in a fleet of new Tonales, a rather poignant question hung in the humid air: just how much pure, unfiltered Alfa-ness is actually left in the cars you can go out and buy today?

It’s a question that Alfa Romeo itself seems to be wrestling with. Recent months have seen Stellantis step back from its EV-only assumptions, with Alfa’s next Giulia and Stelvio now expected to retain combustion options. As part of this Stellantis-era soul-searching, Alfa recently confirmed something that made dyed-in-the-wool Alfisti breathe a collective sigh of relief: the return of the hatchback. Promising to channel the spirit of the 147 and Giulietta, the upcoming C-segment STLA One-based hatch feels like an attempt to reclaim the hearts and minds of the core faithful. And frankly, it needs to. Because walking through the Varano pitlane to our Tonales felt a bit like walking through a museum of Alfa’s lost soul.

Parked tantalisingly nearby were modern classics of wildly different stripes. While the carbon-clad 8C Competizione and the brutally magnificent ES30 SZ are obviously rarefied exotica, it was the sight of a 156 GTA Sportwagon, a wedge-profiled 916 GTV, a Brera and a 4C Spider that truly twisted the knife. They served as a glaring, beautiful illustration of how atomised the current Alfa line-up has become.

Today, the Alfa Romeo showroom consists of the Junior and Tonale, the Giulia saloon, the Stelvio SUV and the limited-run 33 Stradale hypercar, which is entirely sold out. We’re told that the cold, hard mathematics of modern economies of scale mean there is simply no room for an attainable two-door coupé, a sweeping estate or a wind-in-the-hair Spider. These are the very cars that provided the emotional scaffolding for the Alfa Romeo mythos over the past half-century. Today, unless you have near-six-figure money to spend on a Giulia or Stelvio Quadrifoglio, or a seven-figure sum for a 33 Stradale, that visceral, synapse-sizzling Alfa spirit of 25 years ago feels frustratingly out of reach. 

You can book a day at Varano to wring out the historic fleet, but alas, the drizzle meant the classics remained static for us. So, back to the Alfa Romeo of today. To find the pulse, we were let loose with professional drivers guiding us around the twists and turns of the circuit. Unsurprisingly, the primary car for our track session was the Giulia Quadrifoglio, although we also sampled the full range minus the 33 Stradale.

The Giulia is an old-stager now, a car currently celebrating its tenth birthday and enjoying a stay of execution as Alfa’s EV-only ambitions have been revised. But my word, what a stay of execution it is. The twin-turbocharged 2.9-litre V6 remains a masterpiece, providing the lion’s share of the day’s joy. We’ve recently driven far newer, objectively faster rivals from BMW and Mercedes-Benz, cars that pack even more horses under their heavily sculpted bonnets. Yet, stepping into the Giulia, its relative simplicity is intoxicatingly refreshing. Where a modern BMW M car will batter your optic nerve with digital screens and an adjustability overload that is more baffling than genuinely useful, the Alfa just asks you to drive it. It hasn’t been entirely ignored over its decade on the planet, either. A mechanical rear limited-slip differential has recently been added to the mix, and you’re still offered the choice between steel and carbon-ceramic brakes, a not-inconsiderable four-figure option. Not one I’d go for…

While the optional carbon ceramics possess ferocious, face-distorting stopping power, the pedal itself remains slightly wooden. It lacks that final, granular degree of hydraulic feedback, forcing you to trust the mathematics rather than feel the bite. However, get over that and there’s a lot to love. The Giulia Quadrifoglio dances on its toes in a way the belies its size. Fling it into Varano’s tighter hairpins and the mechanical limited-slip differential – which thankfully replaced the electronic-controlled diff of old a few years ago – allows you to ride the throttle with deliciously analogue predictability. With the optional Akrapovič exhaust howling a sonorous raspy aria, it is a visceral experience in a distinctly Alfa way.

For those venturing beyond the entry-level Safe driving tier, the academy’s Advanced, Sports and intensive two-day Advanced Driving programmes offer a wonderfully tactile deep dive into car control. Participants are thrown into emergency-braking simulations, wrestle with pneumatic slide machines designed to induce sudden rear-wheel skids and tackle an artificially wet, low-grip GT Track to highlight the limits of the cars’ active safety systems. As the syllabus progresses into the Sports and Advanced tiers, the focus sharpens onto pure track craft. You’re paired with professional racing instructors who ride shotgun to help finesse your cornering trajectories, braking modulation and throttle application. It’s all backed by pit-linked telemetry systems that mercilessly dissect your steering angles and pedal inputs in real time, aiming to transform raw speed into genuine, repeatable pace.

Despite Varano being a bit too short and frantic to fully unbridle the Giulia’s 500bhp-plus, we certainly gave it our best shot at the Alfa Romeo Driving Academy. In the passenger seat was Giampiero Simoni, a name that will instantly spark joy for anyone who remembers the golden Super Touring heyday of the 1990s British Touring Car Championship. He was part of the squad that took the 1994 title for Alfa Romeo – the kind of grassroots motor sport programme marketing that Alfa is badly lacking.

There wasn’t much time to ruminate on that, because I was first out on a very damp track in 500bhp of someone else’s car. After a first corner neither of us will look back on with much fondness, Simoni was utterly adept at getting me to finesse the Giulia along the damp Tarmac, coaxing out the chassis’s inherent balance. Well, when I wasn’t getting on the throttle just that little bit too early.

Once back at base, checking the data-logging to see just how far off the reference lap set by the professionals I actually was, complete with a general mark out of ten, it clicked. Each of us had several bites at the cherry, our confidence and pace building as the damp track gradually yielded to a drying line. I posted an average telemetry score of 7.22 in the Giulia Quadrifoglio. Frankly, this was a pleasant surprise; I’ve never been a huge advocate of carbon-ceramic brakes paired with brake-by-wire systems. Call it a personal quirk, but I crave the granular, analogue feel of traditional set-ups. That’s my excuse for such a low score, and a braking graph that looked like a bad day in the Bay of Biscay. Still, a 7.22 was nothing to sniff at, even if it remained a somewhat humbling distance away from the 8.2 laid down by a rather talented French journo in another group.

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