ALPINA D3 S TOURING

Super-diesel goes to Italy and wins friends in rapid places

- RICHARD LANE

MILEAGE 4811

WHY WE'RE RUNNING IT

To see if a fast estate - even a diesel one - is one of the best cars in the world.

Unexpected: turning up to try a bleeding-edge supercar - one whose figures make even a Porsche 917/30 look wispy - and finding that personnel on the project want to chat about your oil-burner estate.

Okay, not wildly unexpected. Any Alpina goes unappreciated by 99.9% of people, but for the other 0.1%, even a subtle one like ours may as well show up in fluoro-pink with pom-poms attached and General Lee Dixie horn firing. And there were lots of 0.1 per centers on this event. Everyone, basically.

Having been invited to test one of the first production examples of the Pininfarina Battista near Turin, it seemed sensible to drive out. But what to take? Tight timelines meant my own long-termer, an Audi E-tron GT, would be inconvenient. Epic streamliner though it is, stopping every 240 miles just wouldn't work.