Now that its parent company FCA wants to turn things around and use its storied badge to make some money, Alfa Romeo needs to put practicality on the checklist of traits its new cars must tick. Evidence of that can be seen in the company's evolution from the 4C to the Giulia sedan and now the Stelvio SUV-each car seemingly getting more useful than the last. The brand will continue to make moves into parts of the market that earn it more cash along with the admiration, but it still needs cars like the 4C for the latter.

Speaking to Auto Express, Alfa's chief technical officer Roberto Fedeli claimed that the move to raise consumer awareness of Alfa Romeo would be to build another take on the sports car. "In order to complete the Alfa range of products we need another couple of pillars – something in the C-Segment and then obviously a sporty product, a very sporty product," said Fedeli. A previous interview uncovered that Alfa Romeo is also looking to revive its competitive spirit and infiltrate Formula 1 tracks, making a sports car the logical choice to build so that it can have a high performance halo car somewhere in the lineup.

Before bringing in an entirely new 4C, Alfa Romeo wants to refresh the current model to get more life out of the investment it initially made in the brand. "Being in the market with that kind of car is not a choice, we have to do it. We have to have a pure sporty car," said Fedeli. "We make some small modifications but then we have to decide if we want to install different engine, or switch the architecture. As you can imagine we have some options, we are working on more than one option." Whichever route Alfa takes, don't expect the finished product to come with a manual gearbox given Fedeli's previous bad experiences developing one, but at least the inviting drive should be able to make up for it. Right?