BRINGING THE ROOF DOWN

Alpine never made a topless GTA Turbo, but German specialist Pahnhenrich did. Matthew Hayward is in for a day of pure theatre

- 

They’re actually the same rear tyres as a Lamborghini Countach’s. A fun fact dispensed by this car's eager owner, Dominic Taylor-Lane, as I’m hunched down behind it. It measures two full metres across at the rear, so it makes sense that this widened Alpine GTA’s voluminous rear wheelarches would need monster tyres to fill them.

While sharing tyres with the Italian supercar might sound like great pub chat ammunition, it’s unlikely that anybody down at your local will have any idea what it is. Tell them it’s an Alpine GTA, and it will still take a reasonably knowledgeable car enthusiast to know. And this is clearly no ordinary GTA. Even more significant than the wide bodykit is the fact that this is a convertible.

At this point you might be thinking that Alpine, or Renault, never officially built a convertible GTA. The factory actually built one prototype A610 during the 1990s, inspired by this very car, but it was never put into production. Even the latest, hugely successful A110 has only ever gone after Porsche Cayman buyers, never offering a Boxster equivalent. In fact, Alpine never really bothered with drop-tops much at all, after a tiny number of A106s, A108s and A110s left Dieppe during the early years. Perhaps it was due to the company’s rallying roots.

This car was actually the handiwork of tuning company Autohaus Pahnhenrich GmbH. Primarily, this was an Alpine and - still to this day - Renault dealership in Gütersloh, northern Germany. During the early 1980s, however, Wolfgang Pahnhenrich was keen to take advantage of a gap in the market for a convertible Alpine. His first was the A310 Spyder, a process made relatively straightforward thanks to its steel backbone chassis and glassfibre body.