In the admittedly relatively short history of The Intercooler, we have awarded a full 10/10 rating to just one car. It’s because we judge cars a little differently to everyone else, who will usually give their highest possible rating to a car that is certainly best in its class, but likely also to be exceptionally good at the job it was designed to do. We don’t: for us nothing less than a car that should change the game for all is enough to warrant all the stars.
Whether it actually does change the game is really neither here nor there, which is just as well because the car that earned that accolade back in 2018, the Alpine A110, is almost as famous for being slow to sell as it is brilliant to drive.
So you might think that once bitten, Alpine was never going to go near two seat sports cars again. That its management would focus instead on hot-ish hatchbacks like the A290 and crossovers like the A390 to whose unveiling last night I’d driven to Alpine’s hometown of Dieppe to see. But you’d be wrong about that. Really rather wrong indeed. During the course of one necessarily short but spectacularly worthwhile interview with Alpine CEO Philippe Krief, I learned the details of not one, but two such cars that are confirmed for production in the near future. One is a true supercar, of which more in a moment, the other is the replacement for the A110.
