The story of the Alfa Romeo Quadrifoglio
Just got lucky
M, AMG, and RS. If you’re a huge car fan, these marques would sound all too familiar. Those letters represent the high-performance divisions of Germany’s leading car makers. Aggressive, sleek, and no-nonsense is how I would describe their branding. The Italians, though, do things rather differently. Alfa Romeo’s high-performance division is called Quadrifoglio, or “four-leaf clover”, the symbol of luck. This is the story of the Alfa Romeo Quadrifoglio.
As we all know, the Germans are a uniformly no-nonsense bunch of people, it’s all organized, and well put together. The Italians take things a little less seriously, compared to M, AMG, and RS, Quadrifoglio sounds more light-hearted, fun, and unique.
Origins of the marque
The four-leaf clover is a well-known symbol of luck. So in 1923 Ugo Sivocci, one of the four racing drivers for Alfa Romeo (one of which was Enzo Ferrari, yes, the legend himself), decided to paint the grille of his car the symbol of the four-leaf clover. This is because despite being a good driver with tons of experience and technical skills, believed to have bad luck.
The first car to bear the Quadrifoglio insignia was one of the four Alfa Romeo RLs for the 1923 Targa Florio.
The superstition
After Sivocci painted the grille of his RL with a four-leaf clover to get rid of his bad luck, the superstitious were convinced that the effort was somehow effective, because of the results of the Targa Florio race that year in Madonie.
On a rather sad note, and to really drive the point home that the four-leaf clover was actually effective, a tragic crash that took Sivocci’s life at the Monza raceway in the same year, made the current and future Alfa Romeo racing drivers remember the importance of the Quadrifoglio as the P1 that Sivocci was driving when he crashed didn’t have the logo on it.
The badge may be light-hearted, but the cars are seriously aggressive. Currently, there are two models that received the Quadrifoglio treatment, the Giulia, and the Stelvio, which are incidentally, the only two cars that Alfa Romeo makes before the Tonale was introduced, and they are powered by a 500 hp 2.9-liter Ferrari F154-derived 690T V6 engine.
