Alpine A110S review: At the speed of light

IT'S never pretty when a grown man cries, so I'll spare you a description of all the blubbering involved when I had to hand the Alpine A110S over to a colleague (let's just say there was snot).

In 24 frenetic hours with the little French coupe I had covered 297 kilometres, meaning I'd crammed a typical week's distance into a single day. That sounds like an awful lot, but in the A110S, you tend to keep going and going, because you simply can't help yourself.

If any car feels like it was put together purely to pluck the strings of driving pleasure, this is it. The Alpine's balance through corners beggars belief, and if cars had pores, it would ooze exuberance from every one of them. Pitch it in hard and there's never a sense that the A110S wants to push wide or that its rear wants to overtake the front. It simply hunkers down, slips faithfully through and whips out like a missile, eager for more. "Take all the liberties you want with me," it seems to say. "I'll never pirouette into the roadside shrubbery."