► We chat to Alfa Romeo’s marketing boss
► He wants to get back to attainable sports cars
► But he wants to make some more profit first
Profitability. That six-syllable word can strike down any Alfa Romeo accountant. Or at least it could before Jean-Phillipe Imparato arrived in 2021 to steady the ship. By the time he stepped down as CEO at the end of 2024, Alfa Romeo was one of the fastest growing premium brands in the world, enjoying a massive 30% increase in sales in 2023 alone.
He also implemented a bold new product plan that’ll see Alfa launch replacements for the Stelvio SUV and Giulia saloon by the end of 2026, followed by a new, Range Rover-rivalling SUV in 2027. It certainly seems like Alfa is functioning well, but there’s one thing in the company’s plan that’s conspicuous by its absence. A sports car.
And before you all write in to complain, for the purposes of this report, I’m ignoring the 33 Stradale. It’s a great pin-up for Alfa Romeo, but it doesn’t really respect the heritage of cars like the GTV, the Spider or even the 4C, as it’s a ludicrously expensive handbuilt supercar for a ruthlessly selective customer base. It isn’t a performance car anyone can buy.
But that could soon change. At the launch of the Junior Ibrida, I quizzed Cristiano Fiorio, head of Alfa Romeo’s marketing department, about whether the 33 Stradale will form the template for all Alfa’s future sports cars – and he told me it won’t.
‘Any person working at Alfa Romeo will tell you that we would like to have another performance sort of reachable car,’ he said. ‘But I always believe that, before going into dreams, we have to deliver.
‘Alfa Romeo doesn’t have the means of Audi or Mercedes or Porsche because of volumes that we generate – and we have to do things step by step. So, we have been, in the last three/four years, being very diligent in putting in order again the accountability of the brand in terms of delivering results.
‘We have to start from the credibility. Doing one model every year, proving that we are able to execute, to make it profitable, to make numbers which are acceptable for the investment we have done. Once we have done a track record on that, then we can dream.’
How the hell did the 33 Stradale get signed off, then?
From what I gather, that project was off the books. It was developed in a similar fashion to the Lamborghini Miura, in the sense it was pieced together after hours by a team of devoted enthusiasts who were under strict instructions to not let it bankrupt the company.
Fiorio explained: ‘The 33 Stradale was done by a crazy bunch of people that said “okay, let’s go against the odds.” It was a project that was managed outside the normal business day-to-day of the company. The agreement was do not impact the day-to-day activities.
‘Because if you impact that and if you start saying, “oh, but yeah, I was working on the 33 Stradale. That is why I didn’t sell one more Junior, one more Tonale, one more Giulia.” Then, f**k off. You are not going to do that.’
Fiorio further justified the 33 Stradale’s existence with an anecdote about how much the car has improved Alfa’s image. ‘You can argue that it’s for 33 people,’ he said, ‘but the extension of 33 Stradale is huge. The number of video games, scale models, accessories that we have been working on doing with 33 Stradale is immense.’
What Alfa Romeo’s new sports car look like?
That’s what worries me. Over the next five years, Alfa Romeo will be steadily swept under the shade of the Stellantis technical umbrella, which has the potential to choke the life out of its cars. My lasting impression of the Junior SUV – the first Alfa born from this new world order – is that it drives like a slightly stiffer Peugeot.
It’s hardly the last word in dynamism simply because its STLA Medium platform doesn’t lend itself well to sporty cars. Alfa also won’t use the Giorgio platform that underpins the current Giulia as it’s now handed development of that chassis over to Maserati.
So, STLA Large will likely become the saving grace of Alfa’s sports car. Mercifully, Fiorio hinted in the same interview the platform can accept a petrol engine – and that Alfa Romeo is considering using the architecture to extend the life of the Quadrifoglio’s 2.9-litre V6 by augmenting it with hybrid technology.
However, the architecture is designed to underpin cars measuring between 4764mm and 5126mm long, which is outside the realm of your average two-seat sports car. To put those dimensions into perspective, the Porsche 911 measures 4542mm long, while the Mazda MX-5 is just 3915mm. For that reason, I expect Alfa’s new sports car will evolve into a rival for the BMW M4 and Mercedes-AMG CLE 53.
To Fiorio’s credit, it’ll be a lot more ‘reachable’ than the 33 Stradale – but it probably won’t be anything close to what your average driver would call ‘affordable.’ Alfa’s got a profit margin to protect, after all.