Giugiaro has had nothing to do with the new Alfa Spider beyond its Brera-sourced front half. The rest is down to Pininfarina with help (and diplomatic path-smoothing) from Alfa's Centro Stile.



Of course it makes sense, says Alfa Romeo. Our Spiders have always been Pininfarina designs, right back to the 50s Giulietta Spider which anticipated today's single-nose, two-design-houses policy by having almost exactly the same front end as the Bertone-designed Giulietta Sprint. So there's historical precedent here.



It also helps that Pininfarina designed the hood and its folding mechanism and builds the whole car at its Turin factory - on the same line as the Brera, pragmatically.
Spider

The Spider only has room for two - there are no rear seats

Now, some numbers. The Spider has two seats, not the Brera's sort-of four. The Spider weighs 60kg more than the Brera, an unusually small weight penalty for an open-top version of a car - but then the Brera is itself heavy with that glass roof. As for that crucial measure of an open car's integrity, torsional stiffness, the Spider scores 64,000dNm/radian (never mind exactly what the figures mean, compare the relativities) with the roof down, 74,000 with roof erect. The Brera's figure is 160,000: more than double.



That makes the Spider sound seriously floppy, but Alfa Romeo's Cristina Siletto, engineering chief for Spider/Brera/159/166/Lancia Thesis, says it's still stiffer than a Mercedes SLK, even if shaded by the best in class, the Porsche Boxster. And it's a full 25% more rigid in body twist than the old Spider. That's good. It needed to be.

The signs are good for a tight, incisive, shudder-free drive, then. We'll find out later whether the promise is met.