The Roquefort Files

I’ve bought a car. Not for me another dinky Japanese roadster or quirky Swedish meatball; no, this time I’ve gone down the classic and under-appreciated temperamental Italian sports car route and bought myself an Alfa Romeo GTV. I may be over-egging the case a little, but the truth is that Alfa’s reputation for reliability and durability is so bad that their products depreciate at a truly terrific rate: my 10-year-old garage-queen cost just over £2,000, or less than 10% of its original price.

The reason for this sudden profligacy — after all, ITTET £2k is still a fair old wedge — is that for the past few months, Ash, Jez and Devon have been knitting together the threads of an autumn road trip down to Provence. With echoes of our pan-European 2006 trip still ‘Ringing in my ears, I decided I needed a suitable car for this year’s edition.

As ever, I started off looking at completely impractical vehicles and gradually homed in on a model which split the difference between zOMG11!! awesomeness and sober practicality. I tried and failed to organise a test-drive in an Renault-Alpine GTA, a rear-engined, plastic-bodied sports car (or “death trap” as they say in France); I quizzed my Dad about having a garage-owning friend of his build me a refurbished Mark II Escort; and I gazed longingly at aged ’70s Toyota Celicas on classic car websites.

In the end, though, it was an episode on our 2006 trip to the Nürburgring that got me onto the straight and narrow. On my lap around the track, we’d been overtaken by a pair of Alfa Romeo 75s, square-edged 1980s saloons with suitably Italian/off-the-wall design features like inboard rear brakes and complicated de Dion suspension. These Alfas shot past the Saab and proceeded to drift round the next corner before disappearing off into the leafy distance. Fast forward to earlier this year, and I happened to come across a bright red 75 for sale at a dealership in Edinburgh. Not only that, but it was going for the paltry sum of £1,300. Intrigued, I arranged a test drive and cycled over to the garage on a Friday morning off work. With the garage owner riding shotgun, I took it out for a jaunt round the bypass.

My word.

This was a proper old sports car, even though it looked like a horrible joke from the late ’70s. The throttle response was incredibly eager; just a touch on the pedal and it snarled and popped away, and I liberally but accidentally spun the wheels the first time I pulled away from a stop. It felt lively and balanced. This thing would be a monster on A- and B-roads up north.

It was brilliant, and I didn’t buy it.

There were problems. The gear shift was incredibly vague (the ’box is mounted at the back, so the linkage is longer than usual), it had a tendency to wander at motorway speeds, and the dashboard sported some ultra-tacky faux wood trim that had been glued on by the previous owner. I chatted to the garage owner after we’d returned to the forecourt. “It’s really a £2,300 car,” he explained. “£1,300 for the car itself and about £1,000 to fix all the problems.”

So, I passed on the 75 that day, but the Alfa bug had bitten and after a couple more test drives (one of a ratty green GTV with missing dashboard trim and a wobbly driver’s seat, and one of my eventual purchase), on a rainy night last month I took the train over to Bellshill to pick up my dark blue GTV Twin Spark.

Both my previous cars had a certain element of built-in self-effacement about them. The Cappuccino, for instance, was so diminutive that it deflected the inevitable “mid-life crisis car, eh?” sneers that a sporty two-seater convertible would otherwise have drawn. The Saab was so self-consciously quirky that it attracted bemusement more than it attracted praise or derision. It also helped that parts kept seizing up or falling off.

Not so the GTV: It’s an unapologetically sharp-suited Italian sports car with leather seats and a 7,000 rpm wail, and I almost feel guilty owning it. I want to put a sign in the quarterlight saying, “For sale: Bought for £2,000. Please don’t hate me.” It looks like a million dollars and it probably makes me look like an attention-seeking yuppie. “Surely Jez, as a BMW driver, knows my pain,” I thought, so at his suggestion we went for a drive down a familiar country lane out beyond Penicuik. I wound down the windows, wound up the engine, pointed the car down the winding road and let ’er rip.

“It’s faster than I thought it would be,” Jez said mildly as we came to a hurried halt at an unexpected T-junction a few miles later. High praise!

Later that day we went down to Jeff & Devon’s place to eat barbeque, play cricket and drank beer, and sat lethargic and stunned in the evening as the sun set in the west. All is right with the world.