This is off the Top Gear website:
http://www.topgear.com/content/featu...ries/04/3.html
Oh and when you change down a gear, there's a succession of pops and cackles from the exhaust, like devilish laughter. It doesn't spit flame, but you just know it should. The figures look like this: 0-62mph in 4.2 seconds and 183mph. That's not all. After a few miles you're in thrall to the fact that this is more, far more, than a powertrain car.
The Maserati Cambiocorsa gearbox is at the back, and weight distribution is slightly rear-biased. And though it uses Quattroporte suspension, the wheelbase is significantly shorter than any Maser on sale now, the subframes are bolted solidly to the body instead of through bushes and the steering rack is more direct, the springs and anti-roll bars are stiffer, and the dampers don't bother with the wobbly and ineffective Skyhook adaptive nonsense - they're in the tensed-and-ready position all the time.
There are 20-inch P Zeroes, 285-35 section at the back, and downforce thanks to an underfloor venturi.
So it was built to handle. They could afford to make the springs stiff because they've got a very stiff body to mount them to. The screen pillars, roof, aft pillars and rear wings are a single carbon lay-up, providing huge stiffness. The front wings, door skins and bonnet are carbon too, for lightness. The upper carbon structure is bonded to a steel lower platform, borrowed from the Quattroporte again but shortened and modified.
It works. Well, it does on home turf at least. Alfa is letting outsiders drive it only at the company's own Balocco test track (boo hiss), but it's a long and interesting circuit and I'm having a ball.
So how is it a bad handler? I haven't seen the videos but I will take anything Clarkson says with a grain of salt.
Edit: Alfa is supposedly coming here in a few years.