By: Denis Droppa and Jesse Adams
This isn’t a shootout. It’s a side-by-side road test to see how two cars translate the same genre.
The Alfa Romeo 4C and Toyota 86 aren’t direct rivals but they come at you from the same angle: rear-wheel drive, a purist feel, and a promise of driving entertainment at a (relatively) affordable pricetag in their respective market segments.
That’s where the similarities end.
The lightweight carbonfibre Alfa Romeo 4C is a much more hardcore, track-focused car than the more civilised and palatable Toyota 86. Let’s just say they’re both rock and roll, but the Alfa is Metallica where the Toyota is Bon Jovi.
HARDCORE 4C
The 4C isn’t pleasant to drive in traffic. It’s low, and your bum is a couple of centimetres off the ground as you stare up the taipipes of SUVs. The ride’s spine-crushingly hard, the unassisted steering’s heavy and edgy, and the seat’s hard.
The car’s noisy, with little or no sound deadening in the interests of weight saving. The result is you hear every hiss and whirr of that 1.7-litre turbo engine right behind your back, accompanied by a loud roar of tyres and flicking stones just centimetres below you. You give up trying to crank up the radio volume because the car cacophony just drowns it out – even if Metallica’s playing.
It’s basically a kart with bodywork.
Which is why, when you unleash this mid-engined 4C on a racetrack its raison d’etre becomes obvious. It’s like a penguin, all clumsy and hamfisted on land, diving into the water and suddenly being transformed into a graceful example of hydrodynamic efficiency.
This lightweight coupé relishes smooth, twisty tar. Tail-dancing around corners, swishing through apexes with ultra-direct steering, the lightweight Alfa feels like a purpose-bred racing car. And with a carbon-woven monocoque chassis it almost is a purebred racing car. This ultra-modern tub-style underpinning started in F1 and is common to much more expensive supercars. At R870 000, the 4C is a bargain in tech terms.
86 ON A DIFFERENT PLANET
Step out of the Alfa into the front-engined R376 100 Toyota 86, and you’re on a different planet. Gone is the jarring ride and the aural racket. Here’s a car that wafts through traffic with the comfort of a Corolla – well, nearly. The ride’s firmer than your average rep-mobile but nothing that threatens to dislodge teeth fillings. The steering’s quite direct and the grippy bucket seat reveals the car’s sporting spirit, but the 86 still feels like a car, rather than a racer with number plates like the Alfa.
It’s much heavier and less powerful than the 4C and the Italian car would eat it on any circuit, but where their philosophies coincide is in their tail-happy handling. Both cars can be incited into a drift with little provocation – the stuff of boy-racer dreams.
The 86 is eminently controllable in the midst of counter-steered tomfoolery. With a little practice you can control your preferred degree of tail-happy action with reasonable precision, and there’s just enough power to be fun without being intimidating. No snap-out oversteer here. The more muscular Alfa, with all of its engine weight over the rear axle, requires more throttle circumspection in the pursuit of lurid drifts.
LIGHT AND POTENT ALFA
The little 4C’s powered by a suitably diminutive 1.7-litre turbo engine borrowed from its hatch stablemate the Giulietta, but with outputs pumped ever so slightly to 177kW and 350Nm. Not a huge amount by modern standards, but remember, when pushing a car that weighs just 895kg it equals way more powerful machines in its power-to-weight ratio. A 0-100km/h best of 5 seconds flat, and a quarter-mile of 13.4 puts it into drag race contention with Porsche’s Boxster and Cayman S models, and it blows away cars like BMW’s 1M and M235i.
It also blows away the 86, whose naturally-aspirated 2-litre boxer suffers dramatically from altitude sickness. Toyota quotes 147kW and 205Nm at sea level, but up on the reef these numbers are severely affected by thin air, and we could only manage 0-100km/h in just under 9 seconds with a quarter-mile best of 16.4. Not exactly the figures you’d expect from such a sweet-looking, aerofoiled sportscar ...
DAILY USE?
Neither of these cars are practical in the Corolla sense of the word, but with back seats and a real boot, the 86 could certainly be used on a daily basis – so long as you grocery shop with hand-held baskets and not full-size trolleys. The rear seating arrangement is a bonus, but less than ideal for human beings. An extra weekend getaway togbag or two could go nicely back there, though.
The strictly two-seater 4C, on the other hand, has a major lack of stowage space with only a little cubby compartment aft of the engine bay. It’s just about big enough for one stuffed grocery bag, but be warned, your goods will be cooked on the trip home. Strangely, and unlike most mid-engined cars, the Alfa’s front section is bolted closed with no storage nook. Inside you get a cellphone-sized elastic net between the seats and another hidden where a cubbyhole should be, but that’s about it. No weekend travel here.
VERDICT
We repeat, this is not a shootout as these cars aren’t direct rivals. They’re a pair of slices taken out of a sportscar cake, two cars built for the sheer enjoyment of driving (and drifting) but adopting different paths.
The Alfa’s a focussed track car aimed squarely at dicing with Lotuses on weekend track days, and very compromised in day-to-day driving.
The more civilised Toyota is a daily driver with an appealingly sporty soul, at a (relative) bargain price.
Get our drift?