An operatic tragedy

Even a modern Alfa Romeo is not as other cars (or at least it shouldn’t be). It is said that every car enthusiast should own an Alfa at one time in their life, and while many don’t go back a second time, the marque remains a strange fascinator for many. To such an extent indeed that back when Ferdinand Piech still led Volkswagen, it ran a shadow Alfa design studio with former Alfa design head Walter da Silva producing full-sized concepts of the cars it would produce if it acquired the marque. This used to be the source of some amusement of Fiat’s then Sergio Marchionne who died in 2018 following complications after routine surgery

Alfa’s glory years, however, are long gone. Since the Seventies this storied marque has been far more closely associated with financial problems, unreliability, a Fiat takeover with much interference from the Italian Government and years of titanic struggle and neglect. Yet many still succumbed to the biscione’s bite over the years, including some who, it might be argued, should have known better.

Karl-Heinz Kalbfell, for example, BMW’s trouble-shooting exec with the broken nose, who died racing an old motorcycle at Brands Hatch in 2013. He’d set up the solus Rolls-Royce operation in Goodwood and was nobody’s fool. When he got the top job at Alfa in 2004, he told Gavin Green of Motor Trend magazine: ‘I’ve had job offers before, but Alfa Romeo is irresistible. It has such emotion, tremendous potential and is under achieving at present.’

It was almost as if Kalbfell’s eyes had been anointed by Puck with Oberon’s love potion. Reality check here. Alfa’s annual production at the time of his arrival in 2004 was less than 170,000, against its 2001 total of over 210,000, an all-time high. Since then and despite relatively well-received new models like the Giulia and Stelvio, the numbers have not since reached even the lower of those two peaks. According to carsalesbase.com, in pre-Covid Europe in 2019 it sold just 54,365 cars, the lowest number in records that date back over 30 years. If the comparison helps, the same site records 825,035 European sales for BMW in the same year.

It didn’t take long for reality to bite. In the autumn of 2004, I sat with Kalbfell in a restaurant near the Nürburgring as he cried into his beer saying that changing Alfa’s fortunes would be a task ‘equivalent to persuading the Pope to change his religion.’ He left within 12 months.

Or Luca De Meo, Fiat’s mercurial turn-around specialist who is now chief executive of Renault. De Meo masterminded the brilliant launch of the retro Fiat 500, which arguably saved the company, but when in 2008 he got the top job at Alfa, his boss, Marchionne introduced him saying: ‘this is the man who I have given the unforgivable task of trying to fix Alfa Romeo.’

De Meo, who was replacing Marchionne’s previous whiz-kid appointee, Antonio Baravalle, who’d taken up a new career in publishing (which seems like a modern way of saying; ‘sleep with the fishes’), was under no misapprehensions about the toughness of turning round the ailing Alfa brand. This was three weeks into a two-month production shut down and a €100 million refurbishment of its historic factory at Pomigliano d’Arco near Naples in southern Italy.

‘It will be more difficult than Fiat,’ said De Meo, ‘at least with Fiat we knew where to start, [here] we need to change everything.’

He lasted even less time than Kalbfell and within a year left Alfa for a job with the VW Group. As he told me later, it was a huge relief no longer to have the hopes of the nation weighed on his shoulders: ‘at least at Volkswagen you just have to do your job,’ he said.

Pomigliano d’Arco stopped producing Alfa Romeos in 2011. Marchionne said it wasn’t worth investing in Alfa during the post Lehman Brothers’ collapse financial crisis and, like an old dragon whose best fire-lighting days were behind it, the brand slumbered once more.

In 2010, Harald Wester was appointed to the top job at the cross and snake. Wester is a talented and direct-spoken German engineer who’d previously worked at the VW Group. He’d been promised investment for a series of new models with the aim of increasing Alfa production to 300,000 a year – at the time Marchionne even fantasised about half a million. Wester’s 2014 plan was brave and ambitious, with a fully-funded model plan for eight cars by 2018.

Well wadd’ya know? By the following year, at a Fiat financial results conference, Marchionne announced the plan was being put back because of stalling Chinese growth and, with the American government piling on the pressure, the urgent need to invest heavily in Jeep, which was one of the few items of value gained by Fiat when it took over Chrysler in 2014.

It’s an all too familiar story and Nuvolari’s sepia-toned eyes stare reproachfully out of the history books at the chopping and changing, the grand plans dashed, the wrong-headed investment, the poor model strategies and the many, many broken promises.

And now there’s another perfect storm for Alfa to weather under its new owner, Stellantis, the world’s fifth-largest car maker formed in 2020 out of PSA Peugeot-Citroën, Opel and Vauxhall and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, comprising no fewer than 14 car marques in total.

Carlos Tavares is the tough-talking chief executive of Stellantis with a great track record. This 62-year-old Portuguese made his name at Renault and his first car really was an Alfasud Sprint. He’s a weekend racer of some distinction so his car-guy credentials are pinned to his chest, but he’s going to have to use all his skills and then some to dig Alfa out from where it lies. He’s appointed valued lieutenant, Jean-Phillipe Imparato, to the Alfa Romeo top job, which at least shows some commitment.

Imparato, a burly 54-year old, is a PSA lifer who turned Peugeot around under Tavares. Likeable and passionate, he’ll be the first Alfa CEO with a working knowledge of the rules of rugby union, but can he effect meaningful change? History says it’s going to be tough and while he’s already replaced Daniele Calonaci as the head of design with former Seat design boss, Alejandro Mesonero-Romanos, one could almost smell Puck’s potion once more when last month he said to a group of Italian journalists, ‘when you are at Peugeot, which collects billions of euros a year, you don’t go to Alfa Romeo for career reasons. You do it personally, for reasons of passion…’

Huh oh…

So, where’s the company now? Certainly, the seven-new-model promise of the 2018 product plan formed under Sergio Marchione is in pieces. While Fiat chairman John Elkann and chief executive Mike Manley were still promising ‘new white-space products with particular focus on the Jeep, Maserati and Alfa Romeo brands’ at the reboot of the plan the following year, it was clear that Alfa’s part in this has been slashed. Where in 2018 FCA was promising revivals of the 8C and the GTV, last year they were actually cancelled along with the next Giulietta, and Manley was quoted as saying Alfa was having ‘its wings clipped.’

Currently Alfa only produces two cars; the 2017 Stelvio crossover and the Giulia saloon on which it is based, which was launched the year before that. Both are built at the Cassino plant in Piedmonte San Germano, Southern Italy. The plant was heavily modernised in the years up to the Giulia launch, but at present the Stelvio and Giulia are its only models, which even in 2018 were selling fewer than 100,000 between them. That’s not enough to keep a village store in business, let alone a car factory.

There was a plan to introduce Maserati’s second SUV, the Grecale, to Cassino where it would have become the third model to be built on the Stelvio and Giulia’s inherently rear-wheel drive ‘Giorgio’ platform, developed at a cost of €5 billion, but last month Imparato told the world that poor old Giorgio was itself heading for the exit: ‘We are working on the large platform of Stellantis and we will no longer use the Giorgio.’ Chrysler desperately needs a chassis platform to replace its positively ancient Mercedes E-class-based, rear-drive underpinnings for its Dodge and Chrysler ‘medium-sized’ models in the US and it had been presumed that Giorgio was just the man for the job. No longer: the Stellantis ‘STLA’ large vehicle architecture got the gig instead. Tavares has confirmed this saying that Stellantis’ 14 brands will only use four electrified platforms, which can run as combustion, hybrid and battery-electric drivetrains.

Moreover, Alfa fan forums report that Cassino is working just one shift a day, is facing at least 600 redundancies (possibly more), and also the threat of industrial action, a traditional bugbear of this plant. When it reopened after a huge upgrade for the Stelvio, Cassino was picketed by strikers. ‘Can’t these bloody people see what we’ve done for them?’ said an infuriated Marchionne as his cavalcade swept in.

Tavares has recently said that Fiat’s Italian factories are costing much more than its Spanish and French plants, though not due to wages and that’s not his only problem. Who’d be an Alfa dealer in over three decades of coming and going? The company’s distribution network is shot and so is its ability to fix it quickly; the good dealers moved to represent companies that keep their word and sell cars. And while modern Alfas are decent to drive and good looking, in the latest JD Power US Survey of vehicle dependability, it languishes at the bottom of the table along with Tesla, Jaguar, Land Rover, Chrysler and Volkswagen.

And of the much promised (and beautiful) Tonale C-segment crossover, there is still no sign. The concept was shown at the 2019 Geneva Show and has been the subject of rumours ever since. It was to have been based on the Jeep Compass with a plug-in-hybrid model based on a 1.3-litre turbo petrol engine and an electric motor, with an 11.4kWh lithium-ion battery and a choice of outputs. One current rumour is that Imparato found this combination lacked the requisite performance for an Alfa, another that Tonale is being re-purposed under a PSA platform. When it comes to Alfa Romeo, there’s always a rumour…

Just days ago Peter Campbell of the Financial Times asked Tavares about Alfa Romeo. ‘Alfa Romeo is a strong asset of Stellantis,’ he replied. ‘You know that a lot of companies have wanted to buy Alfa Romeo previously. The Alfa Romeo brand has great value [and] we will ensure that it’s highly profitable with the right tech moving into the EV world.

‘We have a very passionate brand CEO in charge [and] we are fixing the profit and loss and the distribution.’

As I write these words, Callas’s sublime voice dies away as the needle slips towards the centre of the disc. I’m thinking of the great Alfas of the past howling their defiance at the moon as they race back up the plains of Emilia-Romagna on the route of the Mille Miglia, of the generations of squandered opportunity, of all the many marque rebirths I’ve been to, of what they’ve amounted to and what a crying bloody shame it’s all been.

And also, whether that’s the inevitable consequence of such passion, beauty and inspiration; must it always end in tears?