Photo: Alfa Romeo
Welcome to another episode of Cars of the future past, a series at Jalopnik in which we flip through the pages of history to explore long-forgotten concepts and how they shaped the cars we know today.
For a brand always active in motorsport with a feel for the dramatic and sporty, Alfa Romeo surprisingly shuns the super sports car thing. Long, long, long after the low volume Type 33 street and strange size, there was the letter 8C competition, and the 4C, an admirable, if often overlooked, attempt to build a tilting mid-engined sports car “for the masses”. Every few years Alfa likes to tease this crown jewel that you know they want to build, like the gorgeous Viper-based TZ3 Stradale designed by Zagato. But it has no track record of persevering.
However, in the late 1990s, Alfa almost pulled through with a particularly fancy offering built to shine on and off the track.
What it was
Photo: Alfa Romeo
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It was called Scighera and in 1997 it was Alfa Romeo’s idea for a supercar. “Scighera” is Milanese for “fog” – a rather light and bubbly nickname for a 3,200-pound Italian brick with a three-liter, 400 hp twin-turbo V6 behind the driver. The Scighera was Italdesign’s contribution to the Geneva Motor Show that year and borrowed some cues from the design house’s own Nazca C2 concept for BMW from the beginning of the decade.
Like the Nazca, the Scighera hit a slightly unconventional profile for a supercar, but even more dramatic. It got taller and bulkier behind the canopy, carving an almost bread wagon-like shape. The art deco style movable side inlets and the delicate “clown-eye” spotlights gave it a more elegant, luxurious feel that was lacking in other Italian exotics of the time.
The Scighera was an odd car, with its spindly, turbine-like rims, decoy, curved A-pillar, and an interior clad in so much ornate Connolly leather that Silver Spur owners would have been embarrassed. Just look at the belts above the door card!
Photo: Alfa Romeo
It was surprisingly functional for a concept too. While the doors of the Scighera opened conventionally, the gullwing-style side windows opened upwards. While that doesn’t seem to make much sense in practice, it looks stunning when all of the panels have exploded and the glass could be completely removed, turning the Scighera into a stylish T-top.
Photo: Alfa Romeo
The most noticeable corner of the concept, however, was the back quarter. The rear window met the integrated pseudo spoiler, which also served as a huge, curved light bar. This strip led into two elongated, vertical taillights at the absolute edges of the crowd. Nowadays these elements would probably all be connected in an unbroken, upside-down red boomerang, but the effect is still pretty impressive by modern standards. It almost reminds me of the original taillight design of the Maserati 3200GT before the Italian automaker replaced it with something infinitely more boring with the Coupé Midcycle Refresh.
Photo: Alfa Romeo
The Scighera’s weird, concave rear design also hides a neat, hidden trick. Inside this molded “spoiler,” which is largely connected to the rest of the body, is an actual flap that unfolds at high speed. This flap was painted crimson at the bottom, a cue attached to the Mitsubishi HSR-II‘s motive was to accentuate his countless aero devices with plenty of red.
Why it matters
Notice how these side inlet louvers are closed in this image but open in others. How cool! Photo: Alfa Romeo
Reading through so many unique pieces for Cars Of Future Past, I’ve developed an appreciation for prototypes that are not just design studies and museum pieces, but honest proof-of-concepts. That was exactly what the Scighera was. I suspect its looks won’t please everyone – I understand it took a long time to grow on me – but behind its delicate exterior hides a custom-made driver’s car chassis underneath.
The Scighera had this twin turbo V6 like I mentioned earlier. But this engine sent power to all four corners and borrowed the all-wheel drive from the 155 sedan. The frame was based on the 164, consisted only of aluminum and carbon fiber components, and the body was also made entirely of aluminum.
Alfa had bigger dreams for the Scighera than sitting idly by the Monaco marina. At the same Geneva Motor Show in 1997, another Scighera was set up right next to the silver concept. This one was red, with lots of stickers, a monster rear wing and beautiful white painted Cromodora wheels. It was a racing car and it would have looked like home on the Mulsanne.
Photo: Alfa Romeo
The Scighera GT is even more forgotten today than the road concept, likely because it never really raced and also doesn’t appear to have an interior – suggesting that there may not have been any machines under the body. Nonetheless, in another universe, the Scighera GT is just another reason fans are missing out on the golden era of sports car racing of the late 90s, mentioned in the same breaths as the McLaren F1 GTR, Porsche 911 GT2 Evo and Ferrari F40 LM.
What happened to it
Photo: Alfa Romeo
Nothing. The Scighera was going nowhere, though at the time it rumbled that Italdesign was considering limited production, possibly to serve at least as homologation for a racing program. Alfa Romeo only had its flagship supercar when the 8C was launched as a concept in 2003, followed by a production version limited to 500 pieces in 2006. In contrast to the Scighera, Alfa had no racing ambitions for this coupe. Probably the best considering the horror stories about how awful the 8C was to drive.
What games can you drive it in?
There’s only one game that includes the Scighera, though it’s a major problem: Need For Speed III: Hot Pursuit.
In the game it is called Italdesign Scighera, just as the Lamborghini Cala in Need For Speed II was attributed to Italdesign. It’s not the only vehicle from Giorgetto Giugiaro’s studio that can be seen in NFS III, because the Nazca C2 also appeared.
NFS vehicle lists at the time were limited, but extremely inspired nonetheless. Perhaps it just reflects the exciting concepts and automotive design in general before the turn of the millennium, but Electronic Arts kept a keen eye when selecting its products. This was enhanced by Showcase Mode, a staple of those early NFS titles that provided an innovative and educational way to explore each vehicle and really take advantage of the multimedia capabilities of CD-ROMs. Cars like the Scighera and hear Mercedes-Benz CLK GTR Speaking of the immortal announcer from NFS, they sound less like sports cars and more like heroes of legend.
The post The Scighera concept was Alfa Romeo’s deserved flagship first appeared on monter-une-startup.
