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2018 ALPINE A110 FORBIDDEN FRUIT REVIEW: VIVE LA DIFFÉRENCE! 2
It starts with the exterior design.
When the project kicked off in 2012, Alpine design chief Antony Villain took his team to visit the Jean Rédélé collection in Paris, home to 30 classic Alpines, and asked them to quickly sketch every car.
“The idea was to capture the main features of an Alpine,” he says, “to discover the DNA and mood of the brand.” From this, the essence of the classic A110 was distilled down to a handful of visual elements—the headlamps, the spine over the hood, the sculpted bodysides, and the wide rear quarter panels flowing into the low tail.
All those elements are there in the new A110, though in terms of surfacing and detail and execution, it is a thoroughly modern car.
But the Alpine DNA runs more than skin-deep.
The original A110 was not only compact but ultra-light—it weighed just 1,322 pounds—to better make use of the available power from the four-cylinder Renault engines and deliver agile handling on tight and twisty rally roads.
The new A110—longer, taller, wider than the original and equipped with 21st-century paraphernalia such as airbags, air conditioning, and sat-nav—is nevertheless by modern standards ultra-light.
The fully loaded Premiere Edition tested here weighs a feathery 2,431 pounds, and the base model is 2,380 pounds.
That’s a staggering 630 pounds less than a PDK-equipped Cayman.
Weight saving drove every aspect of the A110’s design and engineering.
The bodywork comprises aluminum panels that cloak a bonded and riveted aluminum core structure.
Aluminum suspension components are bolted to aluminum subframes front and rear, and the 18-inch wheels are forged alloy, made by Fuchs.
Inside are race-style fixed back seats by Sabelt that weigh less than 29 pounds each, and in a world first, the e-brake is incorporated into the Brembo calipers on the rear wheels, saving 5.5 pounds.
To save precious ounces even the stabilizer bars are hollow, and the specially developed audio system, designed by French company Focal, features speakers that weigh less than a pound.
All that attention to detail adds up to a car with a 4 percent better weight to power ratio than a PDK-equipped 718 Cayman.
The base Cayman’s turbocharged 2.5-liter flat-four makes 300 hp and 280 lb-ft of torque, and the A110’s 1.8-liter turbocharged inline-four, a tuned version of a Renault-Nissan engine made in Busan, South Korea, develops 248 hp and 236 lb-ft of torque.
But the little French car is four-tenths of a second quicker than the Porsche to 60 mph, taking just 4.3 seconds to make the sprint.
Physics 101 ….
OK, the Cayman will run to 170 mph while the A110 tops out at 155, but, as Alpine’s voluble deputy managing director Bernard Ollivier points out, there are very few roads on the planet where that’s going to be a decisive factor.
“You don’t have to drive at 155 mph to have pleasure,” echoes Alpine international marketing director Regis Fricotte.
“The A110 is about driving pleasure at any time and at any speed.” And the tight, twisty mountain roads snaking through the Luberon massif in Provence, southern France, proved his point.
Within the first mile, it was clear this car is truly special.
The little Alpine dances down the road like a prima ballerina, light on its feet yet preternaturally calm.
Alpine’s chassis engineers have taken advantage of the A110’s low mass to endow the car with relatively soft, long travel suspension.
As a result, it effortlessly soaks up humps and heaves on the road, keeping its tires in contact with the tarmac at all times and enhancing grip and stability.
Ride quality is astoundingly good for a low slung, lightweight sports car; the Alpine is supple and serene on roads that would have a Cayman jitterbugging all over the place.
The more you drive the A110, the more you’re aware of the virtuous circle set up by the Alpine engineering team’s obsession with weight.
Enabling the tires to work more effectively, for example, means they can be smaller—the Alpine runs modest 205/40 R18 and 235/40 R18 Michelins front and rear—reducing unspring mass and rotational inertia.
That makes the steering feel more communicative, the brakes more responsive, and the chassis feel at once agile and composed.
Less mass also requires less energy to move it: Alpine claims the A110 delivers almost 20 percent better fuel economy than a Cayman on the European combined cycle fuel economy test.