Alfa Romeo Stelvio Veloce

It's long been one of our favourite affordable SUVs. Now it's joining the evo fleet in facelifted form. Will it still be a hit?

- Richard Browne

'C'H-CH-CHANGES', SANG DAVID BOWIE ON HIS 1971 classic. It was this refrain that kept looping round in my head on the day when our new Alfa Romeo arrived at evo Towers. Three years after we last ran a Stelvio Veloce in these pages, had there been any?

RX25 GDY had come straight from photography duties on Anglesey. Aston Parrott, our hyper-talented staff photographer, had been the first behind its wheel, swapping into it for a brief initial stint upon the departure of its bigger brother, the Stelvio Quadrifoglio, from our fleet (see evo 338). As he handed me the key (along with half of the beach, it seemed), he didn't seem overly bothered to be passing it on. 'Drives and sounds like a diesel, but looks beautiful,' was his one-line review. Clearly he'd been spoiled by spending six months in the Veloce’s 513bhp, V6-powered, clover-badged relative. And with that he jumped into his dream photographer-mobile — the 470bhp Skoda Superb Sleeper — and disappeared into the sunset.

If you've ever been to an evo trackday at the Bedford Autodrome, which neighbours