There’s been something in the water over Turin way ever since Sergio Marchionne took the top job in town. The whole Fiat Group has been gathering momentum since he took charge and, while they burst onto the global scene by buying up Chrysler without paying a cent, hindsight could best remember his frenzied period for this car.

In a time when the gasoline engine is improving by tiny increments through expensive materials, blow-hard turbochargers and over-strained software code writers, the Alfa Romeo MiTo MultiAir looks to have provided the good, old-fashioned mechanical breakthrough Alfa Romeo was once known for.

What’s more, it’s a breakthrough that is relatively inexpensive to make and bolts on to almost any engine – and it conquers the car world’s number one goal conflict by delivering more power, more torque, less consumption and fewer emissions.

The drive
It’s a pretty nice thing to drive. For all the talk of its breakthrough technology, the MultiAir MiTo is about as flexible, strong and swift as a mid-sized V6, but delivers the fuel consumption you’d expect of its 1.4-liter four-cylinder turbo engine.

There have been other changes to the MiTo, but they’re minor compared to where Alfa has gone with the engine in this, its first real flag-waving high-technology car in since the common-rail diesel engine.

Launched in three versions, the petrol-powered MultiAir MiTos range from a 103 horsepower non-turbo base model to a 133 horsepower turbo and the range-topping Quadrifoglio Verde (green cloverleaf) with 167 horsepower.

While we had no chance to drive the base engine, both the turbos proved themselves to be smooth, sweet and incredibly, deceptively strong at low engine speeds.

The expected big seller of the family, the 133-pony, 1.4-liter turbo is so strong that Alfa has done away with the six-speed gearbox from the existing MiTo and replaced it with a five-speed unit.

“The engine has very high torque and a very wide range so it does not need six gears anymore. It would just be more weight, more cost, more complication,” MiTo project leader Guido Rovai explained to us.

Is he right – or is it just to save money?
And on our initial drive, he seems absolutely correct. Not only does the MiTo’s little engine spin happily beyond its 5,000 rpm power peak to 6,000 rpm, it can overboost in Sport mode to come up with 152 lb-ft. of torque – at an amazingly low 1,750 rpm.

That gives it the widest spread of useful performance that we can think of, and not just from any four-cylinder engine, either. As an experiment, we asked the 133-horse MiTo to pull up a slight hill in top gear from 1,000 rpm. And, while you’d hardly call it acceleration, it kept pulling without a shudder or a grumble (and it’s becoming a feature of MultiAir engines).

Drive it in normal-traffic mode and you find yourself being lazy with the gearbox because the car can cope with it. It’s so much happier than the slightly laggy setup on the superseded MiTo that Alfa has fitted it with its first Start-Stop technology, which kills the engine when you pop neutral at the lights, then refires when you move the (now shorter) stick into a gear slot or release the brake pedal.

It will calmly pull a gear higher than most four-cylinder cars are capable of, which is good for both noise and fuel economy, and it’s light (at 2,500 lbs.) so its rolling in-gear acceleration is terrific for a B-segment car.

An outright number of 8.4 seconds for the 0-62 mph sprint (with a 129 mph top speed) might not seem scintillating, but in real-world, every-day situations, it’s superb and immensely useful.

Other numbers are better, though, including a city fuel consumption number of 26 mpg and a diesel-esque combined city/highway claim of 42, which leaves it with only 129 grams of CO2 per kilometer. Can’t argue with that.

Some moderate tweaks to the steering and suspension have perked it up in the twisty bits, too. It doesn’t rear-steer so much anymore and it’s much more confident attacking the early parts of a corner than it was, while still pulling out the other side with a little too much body roll, but utter predictability.

Even so, attacking the Mini spec-for-spec on the same price, at least in the European market, isn’t going to be the MiTo’s forte, because its Fiat Punto-based chassis isn’t quite up to the MINI’s standards of rigidity, even if it’s a five-star crasher in the European studies.

Foibles
It’s not perfect, and MiTo criticisms remain. The doors, shaped for style, are so long they can’t be opened wide enough even if the car fits the parking space. You have to take your B-Segment car in search of D-Segment car parks so you can get out of it without putting little dents in neighboring doors.

There’s still nowhere to put anything in the cabin and the boot lip is high and space there is limited anyway.

So, what’s this Quadro, err Quadrifoal, err, Quadra, umm QV like?
If the standard MiTo MultiAir is notable for strength, the Mito MultiAir Quadrifoglio Verde (oh, please don’t make us write that again) is a superb all-rounder.

It takes more aggressive software and a bigger turbo-charger and translates that into 167 horsepower and up to 185 lb-ft. of torque in a package just 22 lbs. heavier than the smaller turbo version.

Based on the same MultiAir four-cylinder turbo engine as its little brother, it moves back to a six-speed gearbox, gains an active suspension damping system, sprints to 62 mph in 7.5 seconds and still manages just 139 grams of CO2/km.
Where the stock MiTo is strong, the Quadrifoglio Verde is immediately a sharper tool, with its revs rising and falling with more speed and a louder, more aggressive exhaust system.

In fact, it has the highest specific output (power-per-liter) of any Alfa production car in history, with 124hp/liter and the performance is helped by the closer ratios of the six-speed box.

So, it’s quick enough?
It bursts off the line with a tidy front-drive chirp, then the louder exhaust sends a very Alfa-esque howl through the cabin and, all the while, the QV gives the impression that it’s so strong, with such a wide spread of performance, that you could happily skip every second gear and not be much slower.

Its torque peak arrives (at 2,500 rpm) slightly higher than it does in the standard car, but it’s still very low and very flexible for a petrol engine and more typical of a diesel, yet this doesn’t drive like a diesel.

It’s still strong in town, it’s still easy to manage at any engine speed and it will still pull top gear from just 1,100 rpm – and it still runs the engine Start-Stop system.

Actively suspended
Where the stock MiTo has become a lovely companion, the QV is that, too, but can become a bundle of fun at the flick of Alfa’s DNA system. This system has always been standard on the MiTo and stands for its Dynamic, Normal and All-Weather modes.
Flick the little chromed lever and you’ll get the appropriate changes to the engine management software (it overboosts the turbo for more torque, tightens the steering and gives faster throttle response in Sport, for example).

The QV takes this to a whole new level, incorporating Alfa’s new active suspension into the DNA system. While it uses the standard steel springs, it boasts five body sensors to figure out what’s going on, then uses a new active shock absorber at each corner.
This has a continuously variable valve in it, so it can change the pressure inside the shock to tweak the suspension to suit the road conditions.

The result is a MiTo that does away with many of the stock car’s flaws. It corners with barely a hint of body roll and you find yourself attacking corners with more and more aggression in search of the limits of its turn-in grip. And then, when you find them, they’re easy to fix as the electronic “diff” comes in to direct power to the outside wheel and the car emerges gleefully out the other side.

It helps that the QV’s 17-inch tyres are one size up from the standard car, but it’s clear that the system really works – at least on the confines of the Balocco, Italy, test facility. The car becomes even better in a series of corners, with none of the MiTo’s tendencies to rear-steering or lots of roll at the rear. It just flicks from one corner to the next and asks for more.

MultiAir’s magic
It’s a deceptively simple system, the MultiAir. Engines are widely regarded as glorified air pumps. The more air you can pump through in a controlled manner, the better all your numbers will be.

The trouble is achieving that control and all manner of schemes have been tried before, with various levels of success. Variable valve timing, which Alfa Romeo pioneered, is an obvious one, but people have gone down development paths to finely control the valves with electrical, hydraulic, air and even rotary systems, but none of them have worked commercially.

The Fiat Group attacked an old theoretical idea of electro-hydraulic activation and made it work.

Essentially, an overhead cam engine will have two camshafts – one for the air inlet cams and one for the exhaust cams. The MiTo MultiAir sheds the inlet cam and uses an extra bump on the exhaust cam to pump some extra engine oil through to directly drive the inlet valves. Before the oil gets to the valve, though, it has to run through a solenoid, which is electrically opened or closed and allows Alfa to infinitely vary everything about the valve opening.

It means the MiTo has no throttle and, instead of having a camshaft shape compromised at 2,000 rpm so it can happily run at 6,000 rpm, Alfa’s engineers have basically written as many different camshaft profiles into the engine’s computer as they could, so it has the ideal “profile” for any job at any time.

It’s so flexible that it can even open and close the valves twice per stroke if it needs to, plus it provides many of direct-fuel injection’s benefits without the price. Alfa claims it can guarantee an increase of around 10 percent in power and 15 percent in torque, while dropping CO2 emissions by 10 percent and NOx emissions by up to 60 percent.

It’s also relatively easy to produce, even though all new technologies are initially expensive. While it removes the camshaft, the rest of the cylinder head remains basically intact, except for the addition of an oil channel for the hydraulic fluid. The rest of the system, which basically a module for each cylinder, sits inside the standard camshaft carrying cradle, which means it’s a simple job on the production line and can be dropped onto any existing engine.

Leftlane’s bottom line
Depending on price, the QV will be the MiTo to have, because it’s easily the best example of the breed to date. And it had to be good, because there’s not a lot wrong with the entry-level turbocharged MiTo.

Either way, even though the technology is clever, practical and high-quality, you’ll come for the history, the charm or the looks and, finally, the technology will help you stay happy with your choice.

What’s in it for North Americans? Alfa Romeo parent Fiat isn’t hesitating to suggest that its MultiAir technology will make its way to North America in Chrysler, Dodge, Fiat and Alfa Romeo vehicles with a quickness. And that’s a very, very good thing.

Words by Michael Taylor. Photos courtesy Alfa Romeo.

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