Alfa Romeo klub Srbija

TOKYO napisao:A i trkali smo se dok sam vozio 75. . . . jedino sto mogu da kazem je da sam ocekivao mnogo vise od auta sa 250 konja...,na relaciji opstina NBGD pa do Zeptera uspeo je da me ostavi svega 15metara. . .

Alfa Romeo 147 GTA
Alfa males can be hard to handle
Jeremy Clarkson



Two or three hundred years ago I tried to make a living selling soft toys. Imagine Graham Norton working on a building site as a hod carrier and you’ll have some idea of just how bad I was.

God it was a lonely existence. All day I was in the car on my own with nothing to look forward to except a lonesome dinner and then bed in some godforsaken provincial hotel, electrocuting myself on the sheets while watching a regional news programme from a region I’d never head of.

I actually looked forward to asking people for directions just so I could talk to someone. And at night, in the hotel bar, I’d contravene every fibre of my Englishness and chat with other reps, even though most of them were overweight psychotics with sample bags full of severed heads.

As for the job itself, well, it was hell. We all know that the biggest problem with asking a girl out is that she might say no. We’ve all been there when the prettiest girl at school says she’d rather go to the pictures with a sack of manure. Well, that’s what it’s like being a salesman: you lead a Billy No-mates existence, being rejected eight or 10 times every single day.

Oh, I went on lots of Close that Deal! selling courses run by Americans in white suits, and I read books on human behaviour, learning that someone’s eyes are a window to their soul. Breathing is important, too: in order to build a rapport with the customer you need to match his respiratory patterns.

And so, armed all this psychobabble, I’d drive hundreds of miles to a toyshop in Swansea where the conversation would go like this:

“Hello, would you like to buy some of these soft dogs?” “No.”

“Okay.”

And then I would check into the Ivy Bush hotel and watch Welsh news with 4m volts coursing through my legs.

I know there are good salesmen who really can sell coals to Newcastle. I read just the other day about a car dealer who invited two Jehovah’s Witnesses into his house; they left 20 minutes later with a P-reg Ford Mondeo.

And who can forget Swiss Toni from The Fast Show? His philosophy was sublime. “You have to make the customer think that his is bigger. But, in order to sell a car to him, you have to know that yours is bigger. You have to keep telling yourself, ‘I’ve got the biggest todger in the world’.”

But I couldn’t do it. I’d walk into a shop knowing, with absolute certainty, that the proprietor had wanted to spend the morning selling clackers and space hoppers, not shooting the breeze with a gawky teenager who was breathing strangely and looking at his crotch.

Most importantly, though, I knew he wouldn’t want the soft dog, partly because it was too expensive and partly because it wasn’t soft enough, but mostly because I’d tucked him up with half a dozen Captain Beakies the previous year that were still sitting there gathering dust.

This brings me on to the biggest asset a salesman can have. It’s more important than a Mondeo ST220, a chunky watch and big genitals. It’s more important than a one-size-fits-all minibar master key or a road map with no page folds. The single most devastating weapon in a salesman’s armoury is a decent product.

Selling BMWs, for instance, is the easiest job in the world. Whenever someone walks through the door of the showroom you know for sure that he isn’t considering any other make of car.

You know he won’t want a test-drive (it’s said 87% of BMW buyers don’t bother). And you know that, since he’s buying a Bee Em, your todger is bigger.

All you have to do is offer a better discount than the BMW dealer in the next town and the sale is yours.

If you’re selling Audis, however, things are never so clear cut. When a customer walks through the door his mind is not made up. You need to reassure him that it’s okay to drive an A4, that his friends won’t laugh or pull his hair at the squash club.

What’s more, he will want a test-drive. And something on that drive, will annoy him. It’ll be different in some small way from the car he normally drives. The clutch will bite at a different point. The indicator stalk will be on the wrong side. He’ll find the radio fiddly. There will be something.

So you’re not only competing for his business with other Audi dealers. You’re competing with the enormous pull of that magnetic north known as the BMW 3-series.

Imagine, then, what it must be like for an Alfa Romeo salesman. He’s sitting there with his dead pot plant in a showroom with the heat turned off to save money, knowing that nobody will walk through the door. Ever.

If he wants to feed his children on anything more nutritious than butt ends and stuff from the waste disposal unit he must go out there into the world and spread the word, knowing full well that nobody will listen.

There’s a given with Alfas: they melt our hearts and our souls, but only the very foolish will actually spend £25,000 on a car that will go wrong every day and suffer from supersonic depreciation. They are like Russian hookers: insanely pretty and willing beyond the ken of man, but you’re going to get a rash.

The new 147 GTA is a case in point. To sell one there’s no point talking about finance deals and equipment levels because if anyone’s being rational about their new car they’re going to buy a Ford Focus RS or, more likely, a VW Golf R32.

If I were charged with the task of selling Alfas I would offer free coffee, free money, a free Cameron Diaz, free anything I could think of to get people into the showroom. Because once they were there, behind the wheel, they’d succumb. Nothing is more certain.

It’s the padded and stitched tan leather, the drilled pedals, the huge, body-hugging seats. When you sit in a Focus RS or a Golf R32 it’s like sitting in a commercial for Lynx aftershave. When you sit in an 147 GTA it’s like sitting in a Venetian’s hand-made suitcase.

Then, when the customer had had five minutes in there, poking at switches and changing gear, I’d pull him out, show him the chromed engine and give him the order form that, if he had even half a heart, he’d sign straight away.

However, I’m not an Alfa salesman, which is why I’m telling you here and now to stay out of the showroom. Do not climb inside one of these cars. Do not look at the engine. Put your hands in the air and stay away from the order form.

The 147 GTA is a mad car. Alfa has taken something that was designed to be a fun little hatchback buzz bomb and hammered a 3.2 litre V6 under the bonnet. Only, unlike Volkswagen and Ford, it hasn’t bothered with four-wheel drive or a clever differential. All the power, all 250bhp of it, is sent directly to the front wheels.

Now managing 250 overenthusiastic and sporty Italian horses is a hard enough job on its own, but when you have to do the steering as well it’s impossible.

So while the bald figures tell you that the GTA can go from 0 to 62mph in 6.3sec, what they don’t tell you is where you end up. Which is back where you started, having spent the time fighting a losing wrestling match with the wheel. I thought the Focus RS torque-steered but this is something else.

Eventually, if you’re lucky, the car can be coaxed to go in roughly your chosen direction of travel, but encounter any bump or dip in the road and, whoa, you’re back on a wild mustang that has inadvertently spilled some wasabi on its testicles.

This is one of those cars that can never be persuaded to settle down. It shouts and waves its arms about and generally behaves like its shirt’s on fire. Even in sixth, on the motorway with Classic FM on the stereo, you’re constantly aware of a finger tapping you on the shoulder urging you to drop it into fourth and live a little.

For 10 minutes it’s a riot but then you start to notice that it doesn’t handle, ride or grip like a Ford or a VW. And over time it would wear you out. I don’t know why but it puts me in mind of Sven-Goran Eriksson’s girlfriend; the one with the red dress and the plunging neckline.

It’s fast, really fast, and £22,500 won’t buy you a better white-knuckle ride. It also makes a tremendous noise. It’s lovely to behold and inside it’s genuinely beautiful. But trust me on this — I’m not a salesman. You don’t want one.

Autodelta 147 GTA
Jeremy Clarkson

Every week I find it jolly easy to be rude on these pages about the latest product from some large and faceless corporation. But because I’m fundamentally weak and spineless, I find it awfully difficult to be similarly critical about the heroic efforts of a mere one-man band.

Chances are, the one-man band in question will have laboured over the project, in his unheated shed, for years and years. He’ll have ignored the needs of his wife and the education of his children because everything in his life will have been devoted to the creation of his new “baby”.

And as a result he’d take it badly if a reviewer peered into the pram and said: “My God, that’s ugly.”

Unfortunately, however, it will be ugly; and dangerous and impractical with it. That’s because cars made in sheds on Black & Decker Workmates are rarely tested in Australian deserts or in the frozen Arctic wastes.

They aren’t deliberately crashed to ensure they’re safe for people to collide in, nor are they driven round a track for thousands of miles to make sure they’re reliable. In fact they’re rarely tested at all, and this is another reason that I avoid them. Because most are accidents that haven’t yet happened.

Somehow, though, a specially tuned car did turn up at the house the other day. It was an Alfa Romeo that had been breathed on by a company called Autodelta, and since there was nothing else for me in the drive I swallowed my nerves and took it for a spin...

I suppose if any cars can be tuned, Alfas make ideal candidates, chiefly because Alfa Romeo itself is not allowed to tune them. Fiat, you see, owns just about all the car firms in Italy, and each is given a specific role.

Ferrari: your job is to win the Formula One world championship until the end of time. Maserati: your job is to make Ferraris that are a little softer and a little more practical for the middle-aged businessman who wants bespoke engineering on an everyday basis. Fiat: your job is to make cars for the walnut-faced peasantry, and Lancia: your job is to make Fiats for the more successful and style-orientated motorist.

Job done, and a car in there for everyone. But unfortunately that leaves Alfa Romeo with nothing to do. They aren’t allowed to compete with any of the others and that means they have to try making cars that aren’t too fast, or sporty, or luxurious, or stylish, or cheap. In other words it’s in their remit to be deliberately average.

Happily, they’re not very good at it. I drove a 166 to Wakefield last week and must say that, on paper, it’s complete rubbish. It’s slower than the equivalent 5-series BMW, thirstier than a solid rocket booster and equipped with...well, almost nothing at all. It doesn’t even come with a cupholder and the depreciation has to be experienced to be believed. Buy one tomorrow for £29,900 and in one year it will be worth just £13,000. That’s £17,000 gone down the pan. Small wonder, I reasoned, as I plodded along, that they’ve only managed to sell two in Britain this year.

And yet, beneath the politically inspired ordinariness, you can sense it has been designed and thought-out by people who really do care. It had a soul, that car...a real, genuine character that somehow managed to turn every mile of the journey into a heart-warming event.

If I were to be in the market for a large four-door saloon, I wouldn’t hesitate for a second. I’d hang the cost and get myself a 166.

Imagine, though, if you could combine this sense of being with some genuinely exciting performance. Imagine if you could free Alfa from its Fiat shackles and untie the engineers’ arms. And now stop imagining, because such a car is here, in the shape of the Autodelta 147 GTA.

The heart of the machine is the engine, which is a bored-out version of the renowned Alfa V6. So you get 3.7 litres which, thanks to specially made stainless steel exhausts, a Ferrari throttle system and a remapped computer, means an almost unbelievable 328bhp is to hand.

Now that’s all very well and good, but the standard car cannot cope with the power from its 3.2 litre, 247bhp engine. If you even think about going near the throttle, its front wheels light up like Catherine wheels and you go nowhere in a cloud of expensive Pirelli smoke.

The trick is to trickle away from the lights, wondering why you didn’t simply buy the 1.6 litre version, and then floor it. But even then you need to be careful, because torque steer will put you straight into the nearest tree.

The fact is that you cannot put large power outputs through the front wheels alone. They’ve got their work cut out doing the steering and the last thing they need is to be distracted from the job with all those angry Italian horsepowers.

Engineers at Saab once told me that the most power you could realistically entrust to a front-wheel-drive car is 220bhp. A point they proved recently by launching an unwieldy 250bhp front-driver called the Hot Aero.

And yet here’s Autodelta putting 328bhp through those front wheels. Are they mad? Do they want to kill only their customers, or are they after people coming the other way as well? Driving a front-wheel-drive hatchback with 328bhp is like playing Russian roulette with a fully loaded gun. It’s like trying to fly a helicopter gunship while drunk: you’re going to crash, and you’re going to die.

To try to get round the problem, they’ve fitted a limited-slip differential, and that started the alarm bells ringing even more stridently. Ford fitted such a thing to its Focus RS and turned what might have been quite a nice car into a complete liability. On anything other than a smooth track it would suddenly turn sharp left for no reason. And you couldn’t prepare yourself, because sometimes it would suddenly turn sharp right. Limited slip diffs in front-wheel-drive cars, I deduced after a sweaty, terrifying drive through Wales in the RS, Do Not Work.

I was therefore decidedly nervous as I tippy-toed out of my drive in Autodelta’s passport to the next life. I’d said a tearful goodbye to my wife, and hugged the kids: Daddy wasn’t coming back.

The accident, I knew within moments, was going to be a big one, because this car isn’t ferociously fast. It’s much quicker than that. Ferrari throttle? Forget it. When you stamp on the accelerator it’s like you’ve hit the Millennium Falcon’s hyperdrive. Suddenly all the stars are fluorescent tubes.

In bald English, 0 to 60mph takes 5sec. Flat-out you’ll be doing 175mph, and therefore there has never been a hatchback this hot before.

A corner was coming. And then it was a distant speck in my rear-view mirror. I vaguely remember turning the wheel and I have a dim recollection of being astounded by the grip...and then the moment was gone.

No, really, the damn thing’s a barnacle. Normally, in a tight bend, a front-drive car will spin the inside wheel uselessly, which means the one on the outside suddenly has to do all the steering and power-handling. But obviously it can’t and you understeer off the road. But with that diff, the inside wheel doesn’t spin, it grips and grips and then it grips some more.

Yes, bumps will cause some violent tugging at the wheel, and yes, it graunches horribly while reversing at slow speed, but the upside is a whole new chapter written into the laws of physics.

I’d love to stop at this point and give the man who made this car a nice warm feeling in the pit of his tummy. But I’m duty bound to point out one or two shortcomings.

First, the body kit was awful, but worse than this was the ride. The car I drove belonged to a 22-year-old — I’d love to see his insurance bill — and he’d set it up completely wrong. It had the compliancy of an RSJ and the comfort of sitting down sharply on the sharp end of a piledriver.

But, I see from the brochure, you don’t need to fit springs and dampers made from oak and iron. You can have more conventional stuff if that’s what you fancy — and take it from me, you do. You can leave the body kit off the options list as well.

This has an effect on price. As tested, my car cost £40,000, which, considering the speed and grip, has to be the bargain of the century. But if you just stick to the engine, the diff and some tasty tyres, it’s going to cost a lot less.

Better still, you can have all the important modifications that can be fitted to any Alfa: the 166, the 156 and the GTV. And that’s a tempting prospect. It means you can have an Alfa Romeo. Not just a Fiat with an Alfa Romeo badge.

VITAL STATISTICS

Model: Autodelta 147 GTA
Engine type: V6, 3750cc
Power: 328bhp @ 7300rpm
Torque: 260 lb ft @ 4700rpm
Transmission: Six-speed manual, front-wheel drive
Suspension: Height-adjustable coil struts
Tyres: 225/40 Z18
Fuel: 20mpg (combined)
Acceleration: 0-60mph: 5.0sec
Top speed: 175mph
Price: ÂŁ39,234
Verdict: Mad amount of power and astounding grip make this the hottest hatch ever

Manfred napisao:valjda negde u Obrenovcu, a zivi na NBG-u.