While Alfa's been playing footsie with its electric future (and recoiling from some of it, unsurprisingly), it still lives in hope that you’ll consider taking its current ICE wares seriously. Happily, for now, this stable still includes the Giulia and Stelvio Quadrifoglio, models that we’d cheerily recommend to anyone partial to charismatic internal combustion. Which is obviously everyone reading this.
To further gild the lily, Alfa has issued a new global limited edition - pre-certified as Instant Classics, obviously - dubbed the Collezione. This is intended to celebrate ‘one of the brand’s most famous symbols’: namely, the logo that Ugo Sivocci’s car wore when it won the Targa Florio back in 1923. Celebrate it very narrowly, mind: just 63 units (spread between both Quadrifoglio variants) will be made available, and that’s for the entire planet.
Accordingly, we’re talking about the kind of exclusivity that makes Willy Wonka’s golden tickets seem impossibly numerous. Word is that just two examples of the Giulia Collezione will arrive in the UK - and none at all of the Stelvio, so if you’re not already hammering on the doors of your local Alfa dealer as you ponder this, chances are you might already be out of luck.
Is that a bad thing? Well, if you were hoping for the kind of special sauce that Alfa brought to the GTAm, then you can rest easy: this is mostly about paint. Yep, that’s right, the firm has brewed up a unique shade of its famous red (Rosso Villa d'Este) called, predictably, Rosso Collezione Giulia. Or Rosso Collezione Stelvio. The former is said to indulge ‘darker, almost black shades, in tune with its soul of extreme sportiness’ while the latter is a wee bit brighter.
If this description has you staring at the pictures like a shepherd in a snowstorm, we get it - but we’ll take Alfa’s word for it. Elsewhere you get "1 di 63 Collezione" embroidered on the Sparco seats, which ought to look right at home next to all the exposed carbon fibre, and carbon-ceramic stoppers and the Akrapovic exhaust system are standard. As is the default 520hp you get with the current iteration of 2.9-litre V6.
And that’s about it. Making the overriding theme of the Collezione less about what it is, but what it isn’t - which is widely available. Or cheap. Alfa doesn’t mention a price, though it hardly needs to: the cars bound for the UK (or indeed, anywhere else) are clearly meant only for the most earnest and deep-pocketed Alfisti. It’s all about bragging rights, which is fine for the few, given the confetti is plastered to a terrific saloon car. For everyone else, used prices start at a terrifically reasonable £25k.
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