Midnight madness

Car companies sometimes do crazy things. Rarely, but it does happen. In some ways, you can imagine large car companies as risk-reduction machines. They are there to make sure that fallible human beings do not do anything stupid – things that could either sink the company, kill people, or both.

If you’re into football – of either type – you could imagine them as teams with very solid defences, designed to let no silly business past. But just once in a while, it’s possible for some committed attack to weave its way through the cracks in the defensive lines and do something properly bonkers.

We’ve talked before at Ti about the genesis of the Alpine A110, and at least two books have been written about it (one by me) so we’ll not go over all that old ground again. Suffice it to say that the Alpine project was one of those rare occasions where a small team – call it a skunkworks, to trot out that somewhat over-used term – was able to dodge the corporate risk-taking defence mechanisms and do some properly crazy stuff.