Resurrection

The 2017 alfa romeo giulia.

- Michael Febbo

I remember a time, back toward the end of the 1900s, when sports sedan enthusiasts still cared about things like steering feel, chassis dynamics, and genuine driving pleasure. We would talk about how a car changed directions or how you get the back end to just slightly rotate around by using the car’s delicate throttle response to meter out the perfect amount of power and break the tires loose without blasting them into smoke and noise. Those days, however, are gone. Now we worship an Englishman on TV who destroys tires, hyperbolizes every aspect of a complex automobile into Twitter-like sound bites in-between sexist and racist jabs. This is the world we live in. Cars like the BMW M3, once king of the class, are now built to satiate the power-hungry miscreants who are more concerned with racing Mustangs at stoplights than enjoying a canyon road. Luckily, for those of us with more classic tastes, Alfa Romeo is bringing a sports sedan to our shores that will remind us why we love driving.

It’s been 22 years since Alfa sold the 164 sedan in the United States. Back then, we had the e36 M3, the Mercedes C36 AMG, and even a fairly decent Swedish airplane company was building sports sedans. These were drivers’ cars. Social media didn’t exist, so there wasn’t a venue for showing off dyno numbers and burnout videos to the world. Even Motor Trend, when talking about the greatness of the C36, remarked that accelerating from a stop “isn’t inspiring.” It wasn’t made for that, and the customers who bought these cars understood.