8C Modificata

The underpinnings, including the engine and some suspension components, were largely shared with contemporary Maseratis. But upon the car’s release, Alfa Romeo made sure to let buyers know that this car was not just a reskinned Maserati but was instead a car tuned and developed by Alfa Romeo. All of the stars aligned, and the 8C Competizione had the potential to be one of the most sought-after cars on sale at the time and achieve instant classic status. But once automotive journalists got behind the wheel, things took a turn for the worse.

Nobody could deny that the car was gorgeous to look at or that the sound was anything other than spectacular. But according to many drivers’ estimations, the dynamics didn’t live up to the rest of the package. Jeremey Clarkson at Top Gear gave the car a particularly damming review, starting by calling it “the most beautiful car ever made…” only to turn around and spend the next four minutes of his review complaining about its sloppy dynamics. This wasn’t really fair to Alfa Romeo as track driving was never really the model’s intended purpose. That being said, ask anybody who hasn’t driven an 8C Competizione what they know about it, and they’ll tell you about its sloppy dynamics.

That is where Officine Fioravanti comes in. The team, who made waves a few years ago for presenting a Testarossa with modernized components, has now set their sights also on the 8C. Unlike the Testarossa, which received several visual upgrades on the exterior, the 8C remains unchanged on the outside. Where the real changes happen are all under the skin.

The most significant alteration to increase driving enjoyment is with the transaxle – from the factory, the 8C was only available with a 6-speed paddle-shift automated manual gearbox that, in the world of dual-clutches and ZF automatics, feels sluggish and unrefined. Thankfully, through many changes to both the hardware and software, the 8C now sports a beautiful wood-topped shift knob sitting in a Ferrari-inspired metal open shift gate. This makes the car far more fun behind the wheel, and the shift mechanism is also beautiful and adds an almost jewelry-like display to the center console.

Officine Fioravanti could have stopped there, and people would have snapped up the gearbox upgrade, but they wanted to make the 8C a better car overall. The supposed sloppy handling was tightened up thanks to a custom set of Öhlins coilovers with electronic adjustment, and the first-generation carbon ceramic brakes from the original car were swapped out with a modernized system with less squeaks and better initial bite.

The culmination of all these upgrades is a driving experience that finally lives up to the car’s looks, making it more than a piece of garage art and instead, a car you are excited to take out on your favorite back road. Conventional wisdom says that modified cars tend to not hold their value like a stock example, and it’s a rarity to get back the money you invested in upgrades. But if there was ever a car that the value should increase after the work was done, it’s the 8C Competizione by Officine Fioravanti. If you are the owner of one of these beautiful cars, do yourself a favor and turn it into the driving machine it always should have been.