Alfa Romeo’s Quadrifoglio name turns 100 years old in April.
On April 15, 1923, Italian racing driver Ugo Sivocci painted a four-leaf clover with a white square on his RL Corsa single-seater racing car. After that, he won the 14th Targa Florio, seizing Alfa Romeo’s first of 10 victories in one of Europe’s most important races, as the inaugural event came before the 24 Hours of Le Mans and the Mille Miglia. Sadly, Sivocci died while testing a P1 race car a few months after that first victory, and Alfa Romeo featured a four-leaf clover within a triangle, with the missing point meant to signify his memory.
The rest, as the saying goes, is history, and the Quadrifoglio symbol has been a mainstay of the Alfa Romeo brand ever since. To celebrate its 100-year anniversary, the automaker released a special version of the logo, shown below:
The Quadrifoglio logo adorned the Milanese brand’s race cars from 1923 through the 1960s, where it began to appear on production models.
Examples that carried the clover on their bodywork during that period include the Giulia Sprint GT Veloce and the 1750 GT Veloce, but the name did not become engrained with the models until the 1980s.
In that timeframe, cars like the 164 Quadrifoglio Verde started incorporating the name. The logo, for its part, also evolved into two versions: the Quadrifoglio Oro for luxury-minded models, and Quadrifoglio Verde for the sportier variants.
Even on non-performance models, Alfa Romeo started using “Q” in the vocabulary, which you’ll see on the rear badges in today’s Q4 all-wheel drive models. It also appears with the Q2 self-locking differential on rear-wheel drive models, like the Giulia Estrema we tested a few months ago.
Alfa Romeo will kick off the official 100th anniversary celebration on June 25. This year is also the 60th anniversary of the company’s “Autodelta” racing division. Similar to BMW’s M Division, Autodelta began putting out famous racing cars like the Giulia Sprint GTA in 1965. That anniversary celebration will happen on March 5 in Milan.
Check out our tests of Alfa’s latest Stelvio Quadrifoglio below:
