Another quick one - namely the
Alfa 155 TI DTM '93. After returning from my long absence playing GT5 and seeing that you guys have made one, this ranked fairly high on the list of cars I wanted to try out. Sadly, it took me a while before I could source one and then another while before I again had time to get to it.
But here goes. I tried it in contrast to its Opel Calibra arch nemesis from Greycap (only right), to have a real basis of comparison. As the old DTM seasonals are already gone, there were not many races I tried but did some iterations of the Nordschleiffe and the Cape Ring from A-Spec.
So what is the beast like? For a start, nothing like the Calibra. Sure, it has excellent grip and traction and the puny torque from the 2.5l V6 will never worry the rear wheels in the dry, as long as you keep to the track. In spite of this it is a trickier beast to drive in my opinion. The key to being fast is judging corner entry speeds - overdo them and lifting only makes the situation worse (no trail braking for me yet). The same goes for corner exit - too quick on the throttle and the car simply understeers.
Having said that, it also manages to be much more lively than the Calibra (which suffers much less from the understeer phenomenon in my hands). Very true to the national character of the car, it is pretty much like a too eager terrier pup, something like the first Abarth 500 US commercial, to the Calibra's president of the old Bundesbank demeanor.
So it is incredibly darty when making small corrections (maybe different with a wheel), meaning it is definitely fun, in a slightly less controlled way than the brutally efficient Calibra.
I also found it to work much better on the smooth concrete of Cape Ring than the bumpy variety of the Nordschleiffe, where understeer is not a factor but the deviations from the line and occassional off-track excursions are.
In the end it is a car that will be similarly fast to the Calibra in the hands of a committed expert on a good lap and will certainly take you longer to master but will probably neither provide you with the relaxed ride, nor to the 0.1 sec consistent lap times of the Calibra in an endurance race.
Still, with the 4 exhausts individually hanging off the back (in my eyes one of the cooler looking vehicles in GT5) and the very lively handling when not understeering, it is a car one simply cannot bypass. 👍