Autoworld

Alfa Romeo MiTo

From The Sunday Times March 22, 2009. By Jeremy Clarkson

All petrolheads should own an Alfa if they want to know what differentiates a car from a toaster, says Jeremy Clarkson.

I suppose that in the days when your fishmonger knew your name and what sort of cod you liked on a Friday, “brand loyalty” made sense. Now we live in a world of supermarkets and corporations, it is the most ridiculous thing on all of God’s green earth. No matter how many loyalty cards you have in your wallet.
That said, I am the worst offender. Even though I know Virgin is the best airline, I always try to fly BA. Even though I know HSBC is in fairly good shape, I bank at Barclays. Even though I know the new style of Levi’s reveals my butt crack when I bend over, I would still never buy a pair of Wranglers.

And this brings me neatly onto the question of watches. For some time now I’ve been on the hunt for a new one but the choice is tricky. I couldn’t have a Breitling because I don’t own an Audi. I couldn’t have a Calvin Klein because they are pants, I couldn’t have a Gucci because I’m not a footballist’s wife, I couldn’t have a TW Steel because my wrist isn’t big enough to sport something that can be seen from space, I couldn’t have a Tissot because I’m not eight and the only thing in the world worse than a fake Rolex is a real one.

Have you noticed something odd about Rolexes? Especially the modern ones that wind automatically when you move your wrist about? A great many owners wear them on their right hand. I jump to no conclusions here but you can feel free. Mostly, though, I cannot wear any of these watches because I am an Omega man. I have worn a Seamaster for years, not because James Bond has one and not because Neil Armstrong wore something by the same maker on the moon but because on the day I went away to school my parents gave me a Genève Dynamic.
The trouble is that for the past few years Omega has been the Pillsbury dough of Swiss watches. The Terry and June. Omegas were dreary. They were boring to behold. They were Vectras in a world of Ferraris and Lamborghinis. The De Ville Prestige, for example, was plainly designed by someone who had a black-and-white telly.
This filled me with despair. I wanted a watch. For the same reasons that I bank at Barclays and wear Levi’s, it had to be an Omega, and it just wasn’t coming up with the goods. It was like Leeds United. Once the home of Peter Lorimer and Gary Sprake but now an also-ran bunch of unimaginative clod-hopping no-hopers.

And then one day, in Hong Kong, I saw it. A new Omega. It’s called the Railmaster and it is a thing of unparalleled beauty. There is no button that owners think will call for help if they find themselves in a crashing helicopter on Kilimanjaro, it is not waterproof to 8,000 metres, there is no stopwatch, there is no swivelling bezel to tell you how much air you have left in your tanks and you even have to wind it up every morning or it will stop. Plainly this is a watch for the sedentary soul. The man with no hang glider or mini sub in his garage. I bought it in an instant.



And so it goes with Alfa Romeo. My loyalty to the brand began when I had an old GTV6. It let the air out of its tyres most nights. It would weld its twin-plate clutch to the flywheel if you didn’t drive it for a day or two. And once, it dumped its gear linkage onto the propshaft when I was doing about 60mph. The noise that resulted was extraordinary: a bit like Brian Blessed being raped.

Even the design was silly. It was a hatchback but the rear seat couldn’t be folded down because someone who’d had too much wine had put the petrol tank between the cabin and the boot. And the driving position had to be experienced to be believed. The only way you could get comfortable was if you had arms that were 6ft long, a compressed spine and feet attached directly to your knees.
You might expect me to say that I forgave it all these trespasses because it was so glorious to drive. But it wasn’t. In fact, not since the Alfasud has there been an Alfa which is demonstrably better than the competition. And now, of course, Alfa is just a division of Fiat.
However . . . I have argued many times that owning an Alfa is a portal through which all petrolheads must pass if they genuinely want to know what it is that differentiates a car from a toaster or a washing machine.

Because Alfas have flaws, they feel human, as if they have a soul and a temper. Each one — except the Arna, obviously — is like the tortured hero of a Russian novel, a car of extraordinary depths, a car you can never truly fathom, especially when it is four in the morning and it is enveloped in a cloud of steam, yet again, on the North Circular.

They are like cocaine. The unimaginable highs are always matched by immense, brooding lows. Massive electrical storms that inevitably follow a glorious sultry evening.
For years I have longed for the day when Alfa could put all of this humanity in a car that was good to drive as well. And I really thought the new MiTo might just be the answer; the Railmaster moment, when Alfa stopped being like Leeds United, stopped living on its reputation from the 1970 cup final and put a corker in the back of the net.

It isn’t. It may come with a clever electronic package that enables you to choose what sort of response you’d like from the engine, but it doesn’t matter which option you select: the whole package is let down by a cunning new electric power-steering system that feels, I imagine, like fondling a pair of silicone breasts. There’s no escape from the fact that you are playing with two bags full of jelly.
Then there’s the clever new suspension, in which there are coilover springs inside the shock absorbers. Sounds intriguing but so far as I could work out, the main result is a harsh ride.

There are other issues too. The sloping roof means headroom in the back is poor and the boot is small. The steering wheel is connected to the dash by what looks like a set of Victorian bellows, and the whole horn assembly felt like it was about to come off.
Of course, I loved it. I found myself ignoring the defects and concentrating on the way there’s a choice of what material you’d like to surround the headlights. I loved the crackly, almost flat-four exhaust note, I loved the 155bhp turbocharged engine (from a Fiat), I loved the interior, which feels like it belongs in a much more expensive car. But the thing I love most of all about this car is that, at parties, when people ask what you’re driving, you can say: “An Alfa.”

Men will imagine you are a grand-prix racer from the Fifties. Women will think that you are a bit like the Daniel Day Lewis character in A Room with a View. A bit interesting. Like you might prefer poetry to Nuts. It’s the only brand in the world of sub-supercar motoring that can do this.

There are better small cars if you want a household appliance — the Mini, for instance. There are better small cars if you want a fun drive. The Mini again. And of course there are better-looking cars built to a higher standard. Um, the Mini springs to mind. But I’m afraid there are no better small cars if, like me, you are brand loyal and what you want is an Alfa.