It sounds like a recipe for disaster, but show a QV a good B-road and it doesn’t morph into a soggy-bottomed, over-alcoholic, £80k tiramisu.
Instead, it leans and flows and finds balance easily and everywhere. At first it flirts with nervousness, but this dissipates soon enough. Then the QV is simply superb company.
The Alpine has since 2017 provided a similar service to the Boxster class. It’s an iconoclast, and, true, not everyone loves them.
Deconstruct the A110 driving experience relative to a basic four-pot Boxster and there’s only one winner: the low-slung Porsche has more communicative steering, more grip, a better powertrain, better ergonomics and a better weight distribution.
But the French car also has verve, sensitivity and a captivating sense of tininess the Boxster shows little interest in emulating.
It would be easy to explain this away as a happy accident, on account of its 110kg or so weight advantage, narrower tyres and racier suspension (the Porsche uses MacPherson struts), but the way the A110 handles is clearly deliberate. And daring.
Why so daring? Let’s boil it down. Alpine was already taking a mad risk in manufacturing an all-aluminium, mid-engined car and then offering it for about the price of a Volkswagen Golf R.
