The A110 R is no doubt precisely the car that the majority of its buyers required it to be. But it’s also the only A110 this tester has ever driven that felt notably underpowered, the relationship between its chassis and powertrain having been warped out of its usual sweet proportion. It’s the only one that, when driving hard out of slower corners, felt like it was missing a proper limited-slip differential. In a handful of respects, it felt like a car stretching the fundamentals of its mechanical package just a little too thinly.
The car is still huge fun, mind you, offering massive track-day speed and giant-killing intent for buyers who’ve already enjoyed Alpine’s lesser A110s and are ready for something that feels genuinely ‘next level’. Apart from anything else, it’s a brand-new, one-tonne, mid-engined, combustion-engined sports car, with epic flavouring in lots of places – and it exists in 2023. We should cherish its kind while we can.
But the thought it left me with, as guilty and unreasonable as I felt even to think it, was this: could Alpine not have spent the money it lavished on so much carbonfibre bodywork even better on a Renault Mégane Trophy-spec engine and a limited-slip differential? As much as it might have been a less Alpine-typical approach, might a slightly more complex and interesting car have emerged if it had?
The fact is it didn’t; we know at least some of the reasons why it didn’t; and even if we knew all of them, wondering about ‘what ifs’ and ‘if onlys’ would be no way to do justice to anything. It’s a crutch for a road tester who can’t quite put his finger on exactly what it was that left him only mildly excited by a car that seemed to have the potential for so much more.
And yet if this is to be the greatest height that Alpine’s revived sports car ever reaches, here I am, only mildly excited. And somehow I can’t help wondering.