When we first experienced the reborn Alpine A110 on its home turf, we called it a “baby McLaren”. Here was a two-seater sports car developed and engineered purely to be fun to drive on the road at (sort of) moderate speeds. Weighing just over a tonne, its 252bhp was usable on public highways, not just at a race track.
But how does the brilliant French upstart stack up when you drive one back-to-back with its more expensive British rival? To find out, Matt Prior and Dan Prosser pit the £52,000 A110 against the McLaren 570S, which costs three times the price and has significantly more power.
Which one will be the most rewarding to drive on the road? Watch the video to find out, and subscribe to Autocar on YouTube for more content every week.
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Autocar road test: Alpine A110 review
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The upshot is........
The A110, you can use most of its performance on the Road, the 570S you can only scratch the surface, also, what I think they were trying to get over is that you don’t have to spend a lot to have a great experience driving a Car....
Thoughtful stuff
Dan, you made a very eloquent case in this comparison.
The trend for more ever-more powerful cars in an environment where there is ever-greater traffic and restrictions on their use is going down a fast but ultimately futile cul-de-sac.
Leaving to one side the very separate category of track cars (and the overlap between them), 'sensible' sports cars that you can enage with rather than pose with are surely more relevant than ever.
The title question has not been answered
Why start with "Which is the ultimate driver's car?" if you're not prepared to answer the question?
We all know (anyone who loves cars and reads Autocar regularly) how good the two are, so it's a pointless video/ article if you don't give us something more.
Going into the review, you've left out, IMO, one important criticism of this and, really, all McLarens: the engine soundtrack really isn't very good, in fact just about any rival sounds better, whether it's the Ferrari twin turbo (another flat-crank V8), the AMG/ AM TT V8, the Porsche flat six (especially the n/a from the GT3), or, of course, the glorious V10 from Audi-Lambo. I consider this a very important element of a purebred, and there's no mention of it.