Live Out Your Alfa Giulia GTA Fantasies With A £20k, 276bhp Veloce

How did you celebrate your last birthday? Ice cream and party bags? A boozy night out with workmates? We’re glad Alfa Romeo chose something else to commemorate its 110th anniversary: it created the 533bhp Giulia GTA and GTAm twins. Carbon fibre everywhere and, in the case of the bonkers GTAm, a socking great spoiler that Need For Speed would deem outlandish. Oh, and just the two seats.

But only 500 will be built, each with a price that’s likely to be eye-watering. With the GTA unlikely to fall in line with the average Joe’s salary, we got distracted and started looking through the classifieds for a cheaper Giulia to soothe our fevered Alfa cravings. We’re not especially interested in the diesel engine, while good Giulia Quadrifoglios are still the wrong side of £40,000.

We settled on a Veloce, which is sort of a diet Quadrifoglio. In fact, we actually prefer it to the Q in many ways. It’s quick enough to be exciting, and the cheapest ones are now dropping under the £20,000 mark. The 276bhp Veloce will do 0-62mph in a scant 5.7 seconds and will happily accelerate to a top speed of 149mph.

If that’s not fast enough, we’ve seen that several companies can remap the output up to around 320bhp.

This particular Alfa Giulia Veloce is for sale in one of the major car supermarkets, and comes in the very appealing Misano Blue (one of the best colours besides Monza Red, in our opinion). Fewer than 18,000 miles are on the clock, yet it’s almost half the price of a brand-new version. At £22,000, it’s a bargain in our minds - although Alfa made some upgrades to the interior in early 2020, which this car obviously misses out on.

It looks to be in good condition, with no noticeable scratches, wheel scuffs or massive stone chips. Tinted rear windows and that lovely paint colour are the two optional extras fitted to this car.

There’s plenty of kit on it to start with. You get heated leather seats, sat nav, keyless entry, digital radio and cruise, amongst other things. It’s an automatic - as all UK-bound Veloces are - but the pair of lovely column-mounted shift paddles mostly make up for the lack of manual.

Would you buy a used Giulia Veloce? Comment below.