In which your Race Organizer brings the gorgeous and difficult Alfa 4C to a 24-hour LeMons race
The race series that employs me, the 24 Hours of LeMons, is now in its busiest part of the year, and that means I don’t always have time to drive something suitable for a Race Organizer Review to every event. A couple of weeks ago, I opted for a rental Chrysler 200 at the Pacific Northworst race, but before that I took a blindingly orange-and-white Fiat 500e to San Francisco for some LeMons administrative meetings. Why not follow up a silly-looking yet oddly practical Italian car with an Italian car that makes no sense? Last weekend, I picked up a Rosso Competizione Alfa Romeo 4C at Midway Airport and drove it to the Autobahn Country Club for the 2015 Doin’ Time In Joliet 24 Hours of LeMons.
I spent a lot of time just admiring the 4C’s looks.
My introduction to the 4C involved checking off many items from its long list of weak points: fitting my luggage in the car, climbing in and out of the car multiple times while rearranging everything, driving on rough Chicago streets and then in afternoon rush hour stop-and-go traffic. My Autoweek colleagues have acknowledged some of these weak points, but started their 4C experiences with activities at which the 4C excels.
All of this got me to thinking about the Cool-to-Sensible Spectrum. At the far extreme right side of the CTSS, you have the minivan, which is the most sensible vehicle ever made. On the far extreme left side of the CTSS, you have rail dragsters, minitrucks with dancing beds, Lunar Rovers, and so forth. Get a minivan, you’ll get things done, but your soul will wither and die. Daily-drive Brutus, your life will become a series of terrible misunderstandings, but you’ll stand 10 foot tall with a knife. The 4C is about as far to the left side of this spectrum as you can get with a brand-new street-legal car; jillion-buck supercars actually make more sense, despite their loony performance numbers and wild appearance, because flaunting wealth and/or high-end bad taste brings tangible benefits to the car’s owner.
OK, so this is a bit of a hassle.
Since I own a very cool yet laughably impractical car in yowling red paint, I enjoy spending time on the left side of the Cool-to-Sensible Spectrum. In fact, the ride of the 4C on potholed roads and uneven highway pavement is remarkably similar to that of my chopped-and-slammed Corona on its 55-year-old bias-plies, and the contortions needed to enter and exit the driver’s seat are similar in both cars. The Kustom Korona, however, has a trunk, while the 4C boasts a cruel, tiny, engine-heat-soaked parody of a luggage compartment. My duties as both race official and journalist require that I haul a lot of gear to LeMons races, and so I ended up belting my bags into the 4C’s passenger seat.
Here’s what you see in the 4C’s rear-view mirror.
You can’t see much behind you, which means easy parallel parking is out of the question (which is unfortunate, given the 4C’s small size). The engine noise is overwhelming inside the car, which is a good thing because you don’t hear quite as much road noise as you would otherwise. Pothole strikes are catastrophic events and pavement seams register as sharp blows to the head. With the sequential 6-speed transmission in automatic mode, the 4C does a lot of shuddering, jerking, inappropriate downshifts (generally in front of lawmen), and other frustrating behaviors. Sure, the driver’s seat is quite comfortable and the envy on the faces of other drivers (in their sensible vehicles) is spelled out as clearly as neon lettering, but I do not recommend a couple of hours of a Chicago traffic jam as your introduction to this car.
It’s pretty without being cute, and quick without a thuggish, brutal image.
Then I had to stop at a tollbooth in the cash-only ghetto lanes way off the highway, which meant that I finally had a nice long empty drag strip back to the stop-and-go traffic. Putting the transmission in manual mode and banging through the first few gears at full throttle… ah, now I get a glimpse of what this car is about. There’s no turbo lag, no wheelspin, just microsecond shifts and a head full of beautiful engine noise. Luggage space? That’s for the Octogenarian Edition Grand Marquis!
I’d never had a chance to see the famous Illinois State Pen in Joliet, of Blues Brothers fame, so I stopped by.
During my previous visits to LeMons races at Autobahn Country Club, I’d never had a chance to visit the no-longer-used Joliet Correctional Center, setting of the opening scene in “The Blues Brothers.” I decided that I had to visit the place on this trip. This meant much driving on ill-paved narrow city streets, one of the many tasks for which the Alfa 4C is ill-suited.
The Mulsanne Straightjackets team turned a rusty ’78 Alfa Spider into a credible Alpine Renault A210.
When I arrived at the racetrack for our one and only 24-straight-hours LeMons race of the 2015 season (most tracks lack enthusiasm for all-night racing, preferring to split our races into two daytime sessions), I sought out an Alfa Romeo for the traditional Race Organizer Review photograph of the review car with a LeMons car made by the same manufacturer. Here’s the Organizer’s Choice-winning “Alfine Renault A210,” created from a very rough 1978 Alfa Romeo Spider and lots of sweat. It was at this point that I discovered one of the short list of things at which the 4C excels: impressing car freaks at racetracks. No Race Organizer Review car — including the monstrously badass S65 AMG sedan — has ever come close to causing the amount of swooning, dizzy spells, double-takes, and general awe in a LeMons paddock as this car.
The Miata makes a lot more sense than this car. Get the 4C anyway. What are you, scared?
Because I was working a 24-straight-hour race (which, in the end, was won by an Acura Integra by about a 30-second margin), I didn’t have time to go take the 4C on some appropriately twisty roads, and the Autobahn management nixed the idea of letting me take it onto their track before the race before I could even phrase more than the first few words of the question. I was able to drive a bit on some empty roads near the track, however, and I can tell that this car would be delirious fun on anything resembling a road-course racetrack. The more your driving venue resembles such a track, the more happy you will be with the 4C. Comfort? Visibility? Get a Camry like the rest of the living dead! The sequential transmission, so balky and frustrating in stop-and-go traffic, pulls off perfect throttle-blipping downshifts every time. Light weight, instant throttle response, big sticky tires — all of it is just perfect for the handful of things the 4C does well. As for the other things… well, if you have a problem with them, there’s a Town & Country minivan waiting to feed your spirit straight into the debarker!
The 4C is not so good at this.
After the race, I dropped off the 4C at the airport, flew to Denver, and hopped into my depressingly sensible Lexus LS at the airport garage. My LS has a hundred things it does very well and only a few things it does poorly, while the ratio goes the other way with the 4C. Would I drive a 4C every day? Yes. Yes, I would. Not since the nearly-as-ridiculous Mitsubishi Evo Race Organizer Review car a couple of years back have I missed one of these ROR cars quite as much as I do the 4C.
