Alfa Brera S First Pics
Prodrive Brera S promises a sharper drive
Alfa Brera S
The carmaker has attempted to answer criticisms that its coupe is nowhere near sharp enough by spending a year sorting out the suspension.
The good news is that there is supposed to be a weight reduction, a very small weight reduction, but we’ll get to that in a minute.
The car comes in 185 bhp 2.2 JTS and the 260 bhp 3.2 V6 JTS guise and is only available with front-wheel drive.
It will be limited to 500 individually numbered models and has been designed as less of a long distance tourer and more with UK B-roads in mind.
Prodrive engineers have lowered the car by 10mm, giving it less roll and a lower centre of gravity.
Spring rates have been increased by over 50% compared to the standard Alfa Brera, which is said to give the car a more nimble and agile feel, while specially tuned gas-filled mono-tube dampers give tighter body control.
To reduce roll and pitch and achieve an even flatter cornering attitude, Prodrive commissioned bespoke Eibach coil springs and Bilstein dampers.
Alfa says exhausts mirror rear lighst
He said the car now inspires more confidence and has significantly better steering.
‘Our painstaking work with the spring set-up controls exactly how much the car pitches and rolls with every lump, bump, camber and pothole on our roads,’ added Cambridge.
‘Then we developed the dampers to control the rate at which the springs respond. Once we were satisfied with that, we set about really affecting the feel and response of the steering to inspire confidence.’
The suspension geometry has been revised and there are new 19” 8C style alloys that reduce unsprung weight.
Alfa has also added hollow anti-roll bars and aluminium suspension components which it says also shave a little bit of mass.
The problem is when you go to Alfa’s website you notice that the standard V6 is exactly the same weight as the new S version, 1540kg.
Leather dash is £1500 more
Acceleration is the same as well, the 3.2 V6 JTS Alfa Brera S can reach 62 mph from rest in 7.0 seconds respectively, and go on to 155mph.
The 2.2 is £24,950 OTR and the V6 is £28,450.
10 year old + Alfas such as the 145 Cloverleaf or the 155 would still give Alfas of new a run for their money, OK they might not be reliable but they are good fun.
I think Alfa really need to change things around on the driving front, the looks are great and always have been, for this I salute them, but come on guys get back to a RWD platform for the masses.
not a caterham by any stretch (yes I have one of those :-)) or sharp but very very nice ultimately a cars hanndling behaviour is limited by how much weight it has and where it is located. Prodrive have had to spend alot of time tweaking against physics. As a typical past alfa owner I love the mark and they always perform better on the road than the performance figures suggest, however I do agree, they sort of fall between stools, but drive one and they drive very nicely look great and bits don't seem to fall off any more which is a shame as it was a great way of saving weight on my Alfa Sud ;-)as i remember around 800kg for
a 4 seater hatch back. qed makes you realise how heavy this thing and other similarly weighted cars are.
http://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?f=99&...
GingerWizard
Maybe when they build cars that perform I might switch back again.
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