There was a trend in England in the late ’90s to buy cars in Europe where list prices were much lower and then personally import them. Relaxations in exchange controls and moves by the Common Market to free up trade between members meant that manufacturers couldn’t refuse to supply a right hand drive car to a left hand drive country if you ordered it like that. To save my company money, I’d already bought a Renault Megane, a Peugeot 406 Coupe and a BMW Z3 in the Netherlands for members of my staff. It always made a nice day out to go and collect it too.
I’m not very good at remembering birthdays. I entirely missed my wife Janice’s birthday in September 1999 even though it was quite an important one with a big round number involved. By this time her Alfa Romeo 164 2.0 Twinspark was getting to be relatively long in the tooth. To make amends for not buying her a present, I wondered if I might do a personal import which is how I ended up buying her an entire Alfa Romeo 156 2.0 Twinspark Lusso, even if it was 6 months late for her birthday… Thank goodness, she liked it!
If the posters for the Fiat Coupe had inspired me to a purchase there was an image of an Alfa Romeo 156 at launch in Nivola Blue that was seared into my brain. There was absolutely no doubt we should have one, one day. Didn’t care what the press might think. No doubt they would say that the BMW 3-series was still the go-to car, as it was for so many people but the Alfa looked fantastic. Just simple and curvaceous without stripes and rubbing strips or gills and grilles. The rear door handles were ‘hidden’, which started a trend, and nothing was overwrought. I’d long since realised that was what I liked – my Citroën D Super 5 didn’t have the unnecessary rubbing strips of the Pallas variant to spoil its lines, and the Fiat Coupe was similarly pure. Yes, the Alfa 164 had body cladding but that was integral to the design and not an added on Christmas bauble. Oh, and did I mention the 156 was an Alfa Romeo? It was bound to be a great drive!
In fact, we didn’t make another trip to Holland to collect W785 WBK; we collected it from a house near Southampton, not 5 miles from the house my grandparents George and Ivy Brown had settled into in 1948. It was a cancelled order car which had been bound for Cyprus and had a slightly different specification to a 2.0 Twinspark Lusso bound for the UK market – it had the wood rim steering wheel, wooden gear knob and cloth rather than leather but not the wood veneer dash or white faced instruments of the normal UK cars. I didn’t care two hoots. It had ‘teledial’ wheels and in silver it looked just great.
Janice loved it, possibly as her best car – certainly to that date. It was smaller than the Alfa 164 though, both in rear leg room and in bootspace. It was neither a hatchback nor possessed of folding seats but that didn’t matter so much as we had the Mitsubishi Galant VR-4 for family hauling. To be honest, to drive it felt a bit nose heavy and understeery, with a feeling of being a little under damped at the front, especially as the miles piled on. That made it somewhat less adept at coping with our local roads which have lots of undulations and camber changes when they aren’t being downright rough.
Two things put me right on that impression. The first was the loan of a 156 2.5V6 complete with rear wing, whilst Janice’s car was being serviced, which I thought completely spoiled the look. It made me glad that we’d settled for the Twinspark 2 litre four. I’ve heard people subsequently say how good the V6 is, but in my experience the extra weight over the front axle didn’t do it any favours on the roads we use, so I was more than happy with our choice
The second was when I ventured out onto a track in it. I’d booked at a circuit local to Bedford where my office was and which belongs to Dr Jonathan Palmer, former F1 driver. It is not used for racing, just for track days and corporates, so it doesn’t have gravel traps and barriers, just lots and lots of run-offs. If you do fling your car off the track all you do is help the good doctor keep his grass down. I really enjoyed W785 WBK on track. On a smooth surface, it was very communicative and could be persuaded to lose grip at either the front or the back depending how you set it up for a curve. It was good to find out what the car felt like on its limits and I thoroughly enjoyed ragging it to the bone. Spoiler Alert: I was getting a bit of a taste for track days…
Janice’s tenure with the 156 over the next six years and 60000 miles was otherwise pretty uneventful, with one exception that I will get to shortly. We drove to the French Alps one summer with the children. We bought a ski-apartment in one of the resorts in 2003, and having done so, we started to go twice in winter and once in summer. We took the 156 albeit mainly because the car I was by then driving was entirely unsuitable for the task. Another Spoiler Alert: I’ll get to that in due course. As for W785 WBK it ran faultlessly, of course.
Spin forward to summer 2025 we found ourselves at the Alfa Romeo Museum in Milan and I couldn’t help being attracted all over again to the 156 on display – in Nivola Blue, just as I’d originally seen it, and parked next to a 164 3.0V6 Lusso. The museum curators clearly know these cars are every bit as important as the ‘classic’ RWD Alfas.
I told you the roads were rough around our place. One day Janice came in and told me that just as she pulled into the open garage where W785 WBK normally lived, the oil light had come on so would I check it, please? The black line across the gravel was the clue and I set off on a walk to follow it. After a mile and a bit, the black line stopped. The road crosses a peat fen and it cracks and buckles with changes in the weather. There was a raised lump in the blacktop where a lump hadn’t previously been. She’d cracked the oil pan on it. So if anyone wants to know how far an Alfa Twinspark will go with a cracked sump the answer is 2000 yards. Although the car obviously could not be driven, fortunately it’s an easy fix and no lasting harm was done.
Although my 164 had been exemplary, J189 TRX, Janice’s 164 Twinspark had thrown a few niggles around 60000 miles and upwards. So too did that seem to be a threshold for W785 WBK. There was nothing serious or memorable but there was always extra work required at service time often comprising new suspension bushes, a wishbone or a droplink. By 2006 our daughter was well into her teen years and our son, although not quite eleven, already seemed to have the limbs of a gorilla. Something a bit roomier than the 156 would be needed. It didn’t require too much thought though, the replacement was pretty obvious; but dear Curbivores, you will have to be patient to find out just what that was because there were some other fleet changes in the six years that W785 WBK lived with us.
Related CC reading:
Loan Car Outtake: 2003 Alfa Romeo 156 Sportwagen 1.8 16V Twin Spark
The 156 SportWagon that was introduced not long after was my favorite in this model. The designers did an extraordinary job of maintaining the appearance of the sedan when they transformed it into a ‘longroof’ by keeping the hidden rear exterior door handles and the same taillights at the rear. The 159 Sportwagon was also an excellent follow up design.
The 156 was a major success for Alfa, and justifiably so. As much as purists lamented the fact it was FWD, it had a great price/performance/content balance, had great engines (I believe it was the first car with a Common Rail diesel, and those JTD engines are arguably amongst the best diesels ever made) and looked good. As you mention Neil, the hidden rear door handles are a design element that has been reused many times over by various manufacturers
Lovely car. I thought long and hard about importing one of these from Japan. I would have picked the twin spark over the V6 as well.
The ‘teledial’ wheels on your example are just right for the car.
Beautiful car! As the former owner of two rear wheel drive Alfa’s I think it took me until this car came out, to accept FWD Alfa’s … we only had the Milano and 164 here in the US, never the AlfaSud or successors or Fiat-based cars until the 2008 reintroduction. My 1974 Spider had a skid plate under the cast oil pan; it was well-scarred when I bought it and I still remember the sound and feel of striking it hard for the first time on an unexpected dip during a brisk drive on a canyon road. That was one of the things that made it a short-timer in my fleet; many of our back roads are more suited to hot hatches than sports cars.
Beautiful car. I’d read a review in one of the American magazines – I don’t remember which one – and they liked it, of course. However, the article listed all the reasons why it would never sell in the States if Alfa chose to use it to make its return. I wish I could find it because I don’t remember what those reasons were.