Mrs Shed came back unexpectedly early from a visit to her mother’s the other day. That was unlucky for Shed, who was doing the tango with the postmistress in the back porch at the time. You could hardly hear Nat King Cole’s ‘Let’s Face The Music’ over the creaking of Shed’s knees, but you could easily hear Mrs Shed lustily joining in with the line ‘there may be trouble ahead’ as Shed nervously reached for his protective colander.
It’s safe to say that the family Dansette record player reached the end of its useful life at that point, which is a pity as that particular line from Let’s Face The Music would have been very appropriate background music for this week’s shed, an Alfa Romeo Brera 3.2 V6 4WD. Yes, that’s right, not only is it a V6 Brera, it’s also a 4WD V6 Brera. So many exciting and interesting ways for there to be trouble ahead. Or maybe not: the owner, a PHer, says it’s been faultless over the last five years.
Some would say that the gap between how Alfas look and how they go has widened somewhat since the glory days of the '60s. That’s not to say that the more modern Alfas have gone horribly. It’s more that the blend of ingredients has shifted. The Giugiaro-desigend Brera looked the absolute Billy Bs when it appeared as a concept at the 2002 Geneva show. When it turned up at Geneva again three years later as a smaller but otherwise hardly changed production car the excitement and expectations were off the chart.
PH’s quick summation on the ad, the line of data that you’ll see between the pics and the description, mistakenly puts the year as 2005. That would have been great if it had been, because then the motor would have been one of the last Busso V6s, the production of which ceased (to much wailing and gnashing of teeth) on New Years’ Eve 2005. Poignantly, Giuseppe Busso – who may have been the only Italian to wear a flat cap – died just a few days later. Our Brera was actually registered in February 2007 and therefore has the 3,195cc JTS 60-degree V6 generating 256hp at 6,200rpm and 237lb ft at 4,500rpm.
Those numbers sound all right but unfortunately there are some other numbers that don’t. One is the weight. As Shed will sadly tell you, excess weight is a romance-killer. All early Brera V6s were all-wheel drive. Front-drive versions didn’t arrive until 2008 when Alfa started to put more aluminium into the Brera in an attempt to cut some lard, but before then manual JTS V6s with the Torsen-type Q4 AWD gubbins came in at 1,630kg, compared to 1,540kg in the ’08 FWD cars.
It’s not slow – the 0-60mph time of 6-speed manual Q4s like our shed was 6.6sec, 0.2sec quicker than the 08-on FWD cars – but it never felt especially quick, and definitely not as exciting as the car’s appearance would have had you hoping. It sounded great, but the enjoyment you were getting out of flogging it up the road would have been tainted by the knowledge that your fuel consumption was dropping from the official combined figure of 25.7mpg to something in the mid-teens. The steering was quick verging on twitchy, and understeer was always present in the AWD V6. It looked like a dynamic sports coupe but drove more like a family saloon.
It didn’t accommodate families very well though, the back seats being pretty much only good for folding down in order to increase the boot space to a useful 300 litres. Well, it would have been useful if you didn’t mind risking your back loading stuff in there, as the aperture was designed for style rather than sense. Talking of non-sense, here’s another bad number: £735 for the vehicle tax. It was registered too late to fall into the K with an asterisk sub-band that covers cars with a CO2 figure of over 225g/km (it’s 270g/km) that were registered before 23 March 2006.
It does look great though, doesn’t it? The temptation is so strong. This example has just gone through an MOT test which revealed slightly worn front brake discs and nothing else. For more insights we’ll let you enjoy the excellent and honest ad copy in your own time.
If you’re an Alfa nut wondering how you’d managed to miss a special edition, it’s not actually called a Brera Red Leather & Horseshoes. That’s just the vendor telling you the colour of the car’s interior and the type of wheels it’s got. In an amazing coincidence, the nearest pub to Shed is the Red Leather & Horseshoe. Not exactly the same, admittedly, but you must admit it’s very close.
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