ALFA ROMEO SPIDER

Any reader of car magazines over the years will be painfully aware that Alfa Romeo as a brand has had countless fresh starts and many’s the time a new model has been touted as ‘the car to save Alfa’.

And so it was with the ‘916’ GTV. Much like the Ford era at Jaguar, Alfa purists worried that Fiat ownership would see the brand’s unique appeal diluted in the pursuit of profit as costs were cut and platforms were shared with workaday Tempras and Bravas. Also, like Jaguar and Ford though, the reverse actually happened as Fiat Group’s design and manufacturing clout helped Alfa Romeo move away from its rather shambolic modern history.

The Fiat takeover was completed in 1986 and the new models took a while to filter through, but when the Spider convertible