 |
| The 2018 Alfa Romeo Guilia Ti Lusso Q4. |
Publisher's note: Normally, the cars you read about here at TireKicker are loaned to us by the press fleets of the various manufacturers for several days. Seven is typical. Occasionally,
we'll get a longer period of time, and sometimes it'll only be three or four days. Our "30 Minutes With" series features cars we spent half an hour driving during the just-concluded
Western Automotive Journalists Media Days in
Monterey, California.
Day one of Media Days is a driving program, with journalists taking cars from the staging area at
Quail Lodge in Carmel Valley to
Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca via Laureles Grade. Once there, you swap cars with another journalist for the drive back, get a different car at The Quail, and repeat. Apart from an hour's lunch (this year sponsored by
Nissan), this is the day from 9:00 a.m. until 4:00 p.m., although heavy rains forced us to call it a day at 2:30 this year, reducing the number of cars we could drive.
Twenty-one years of professional TireKicking (I reviewed cars on TV and radio before launching TireKicker in 2008) have put me behind the wheel of just about every make of automobile available in the USA. One of the few that I'd never driven is an Alfa Romeo. Alfa left the U.S. market in 1995, two years before I began writing about cars. And while they've been back for four model years now, I've never been booked in one from a press fleet. Enter Media Days 2018. The 2018 Alfa Romeo Guilia Ti Lusso Q4 became car number three for the day, on the one-way run from the Quail Lodge to Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca.
