Buying any Alfa Romeo Alfasud comes with a health warning. But what a car...
I have a memory of the Alfa Romeo Alfasud that, wait for it, doesn't involve watching one disintegrate into millions of tiny brown particles before my very eyes. Yes, rusting was one the Alfasud's preeminent features that made them perfect for illustrating the theory of entropy to science students, but it wasn't the only thing that made the car famous.
The little Alfa was an inspired piece of design and engineering. The Mk1 Golf GTI was the genesis of the hot hatchback, but the Alfasud represented the first sporting front-wheel-drive hatchback - albeit with one tiny bone of contention, which was that it wasn't a hatchback at all. The first series of cars were, in fact, saloons with a hatchback shape, but that didn't stop them being incredibly practical.
As was the technical brief that Hruska set himself. A front-wheel-drive Alfa had been mooted since the '50s but never materialised due to a gentlemen's agreement that Alfa wouldn't step on Fiat's mass-market toes. The Alfasud was, at last, a democratised Alfa Romeo for blue collars and upwards. But as an Alfa it had to be born with a sporting soul. So Hruska used a four-cylinder, horizontally opposed engine that kept the weight down low and the frontal section small.
As a result, it blew its rivals clean out the water dynamically and received a rapturous reception by the press. Even those sceptics that believed a front-wheel-drive Alfa was sacrilegious were won over by the car's obvious charm. Of course, there were many upgrades along the way, including bigger iterations of the flat-four that culminated in the Ti Quadrifoglio Verde - the car that wowed me.
Of course, the Alfasud's legacy will always be tainted with the colour brown. Yet this stunning piece of silverware shows no signs of that and is a welcome reminder not to allow the Alfasud's poor execution to completely overshadow its fundamentally excellent engineering.
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