I sure hope the customer cars will be put together with a bit more care than this prototype, though, because it had various pieces of loose trim, a seat adjustment button that hadn’t been put back properly and fabric loosely attached with Velcro, plus the new red Alfa badges had already started to fade. That said, the grey life jacket fabric is novel and interesting and brightens up the cabin. Otherwise, the interior is familiar: a bit dated and not super-solid-feeling, sure, but it is pleasingly designed, with lots of physical controls.
Those aero mods supposedly produce 140kg of downforce at 186mph (300kph), but I’d be lying if I said I could feel the effects on my test drive around the Midlands’ greatest driving roads. Apart from that, there are no mechanical changes from the standard Giulia Quadrifoglio. That may come as a disappointment, but only to those who have never driven a Giulia Quadrifoglio, because it remains a sensational super-saloon.
I recently drove the new Audi RS5 for an upcoming road test, and although they are nominally rivals and both have turbocharged V6 engines, they couldn’t be more different. The Giulia is remarkably analogue and old-school. The steering is very quick, not because of variable-ratio trickery, but because it’s just very quick, and you get used to that soon enough. It has the front-end bite and body control to back up those lighting responses, too. It sends all of its 513bhp to the rear wheels only, through a simple mechanical locking differential.
