The V12 aria

Back in early 2018 the Alpine A110 caused a bit of a stir. We’re all over it now – even Dan’s moved on – but back then it was the hot car in our little automotive enthusiast world. We were in the process of the actual launch event down in Aix-en-Provence in France, taking the weekend off between the first week of the ‘major’ country launches – France, Germany, UK etc – and the second week where the journos from other, smaller markets would rock up. I was staying over, partly to catch up on sleep, partly just for the excuse to play with the press cars over the weekend. Such were the perks of the job.

And my boss – Michael Van der Sande, then MD of Alpine – had given me some weekend homework. We’d been invited by the Monaco Cars & Coffee folks to drop in on their regular Sunday morning gathering. Now, normal car companies don’t just ‘drop in’ to Cars & Coffee events – and their Chief Engineers most certainly do not just pitch up with rare-as-hens’-gnashers press cars in the middle of a launch event.

But back then Alpine was not a normal car company, and we did not play by the rules. So your correspondent was tasked with driving one of the cars down to the event, drinking coffee and talking cars. Never one to shirk the tough gigs, I got up at stupid o’clock on Sunday morning, donned my company-boy jacket to shamelessly shill the brand, picked a car at random from the line-up of immaculate press demonstrators in the underground hotel car park, and pointed its nose south.